Module Assignments

• Study the assigned curriculum — both Parts 1 and 2.
• Submit your essay (or your contracted alternative), which must include thoughts on both parts of each module.
• Your peer exchanges are due two days after your essay is due.

The essays are designed to be meaningful exercises of self-exploration (reflections) rather than busy work (summaries).

The practice of philosophy is a major goal of your essays and exchanges. This practice promotes and supports independent, creative and original thinking.

Essays Due by 11:00 PM on Mondays and Thursdays.

• Your essays need to be a thoughtful “journal-like” reflections.
• Essays must address both part 1 and part 2 of each module’s curriculum.
• A good reflection is one that I could not have read before. This is because it is the essay that only you could have written — due to your unique set of life experiences.

Minimum Requirements

• Essays are not summaries. That is busy work.
• Summaries do not receive credit because they do not require serious thought — simply the ability to record information.
• Your essays must be more than 700 words to receive credit and be eligible for a C, more than 800 words to be eligible for a B, and more than 900 words to be eligible for an A.
• Your assignments are not eligible for A’s if they require proofreading.
• Assignments that are partial (not meeting minimum requirements) do not receive partial credit.
• Late assignments are not eligible for credit.

Essay Prompts

You are not required to use the following prompts, but they may help you think about what you are studying:

• What did you learn? What surprised you and/or caused enough doubt that you were inspired to do a little research and fact checking?
• Did you find any specific ideas confusing or difficult?
• Did you have an emotional response, negative or positive? Do you know why?
• Have you had any experiences you are willing to share with our class that help you relate to and understand any of the material in this module?
• Did this assignment contain any “awakening” ideas, those that inspire you rather than depress you?
• Did you find any of the ideas surprising? Why?

Final Assessment Prompts

You do not need to use these final assessment prompts either, but they may help you put what you are studying this semester into a larger perspective.

• Can you give an example or two in your essay that demonstrates you were engaging with, and thinking about, our curriculum in a serious way?
• Did you study everything required or did you rush and skim?
• Did you find yourself thinking about class content when you did not have to, such as finding yourself discussing ideas with friends or family?
• Did you seek clarification about class material that confused you? If not, why not?
• Have your studies contributed to any increase in self-knowledge (how you understand the world and your place in it) or a deeper understanding of one’s current world view?

Africa

The Falashas and the Coptic Christians

For our African unit, rather than begin with traditional African Religion, I thought it might be interesting to look at two traditions closer to home, but at the same time very different due to the cultural context of their arising. Most of us are familiar with both Judaism and Christianity, but how they look in their African context will hopefully provide a unique angle in which to view these traditions. I will start with the Falashas, who are known as the Ethiopian Jews, or sometimes more simply the Black Jews.

We don’t know for a fact where they come from. There are traditions only and no documented evidence. The most interesting story is that these Jews traveled to Ethiopia with the son of King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, but no one can find evidence to confirm this. Other people think they may have slowly moved south from the known Jewish communities in Egypt, but again, we lack evidence.

Despite the lack of evidence, they are accepted as Jews because they themselves say they are Jews. For hundreds of years they have remained a small and often persecuted minority who referred to themselves as the House of Israel. They never actually called themselves Jews. Many of their customs are definitely Jewish, such as the dietary laws and celebrating the Sabbath on Saturdays. What is probably most interesting to the scholars who study these things is that their customs give expression to a much older form of Judaism than anything in the last two thousand years.

An example to illustrate this is that while they study the Bible and some of their own Jewish books, they seem to have had no familiarity with the Talmud, the mainstay of rabbinic Judaism. Another example is that they honor the same day the Jews remember the destruction of the temple, but they honor Solomon’s temple, destroyed by the Babylonians, not the second temple, destroyed by the Romans, which they seem to know nothing about. If we truly accept their Jewishness, then they seem to go back to an ancient form of Judaism and then were virtually cut off from Jewish developments for centuries. This is one of the reasons that the legends go all the way back to Solomon. Other legends mention that they represent some of the lost tribes of Israel, some small group that survived the destruction and expulsion of the ten northern tribes by the Assyrians.

What does seem accepted is that Jewish influence goes back a long time, perhaps beginning with trading and then advancing to ideas and culture. The Christian Church there, for example, “resembles ancient Judaism and includes in its rites circumcision, a form of Sabbath observance, dietary laws similar to those found in the Torah, and other practices preserved in its doctrine” (internet). There is some biblical evidence that there was knowledge of Jews living in Ethiopia, when Isaiah (11: 11-12) refers to calling all of the Jews home in the last days including those in Cush, which was a part of Ethiopia at that time.

Religious Life

“The most remarkable aspect of Falasha culture is their peculiar form of non-Talmudic Judaism, developed in isolation from the main currents of Jewish religious thought. They believe in the god of Israel; the Old Testament commandments are their guidelines. The Falasha celebrate most festivals and fasts mentioned in the Torah, observe food taboos, and offer sacrifices. Circumcision is carried out on the eighth day after birth, and the Sabbath is closely observed. The Falasha Holy Book is the Ethiopian Bible, without the New Testament, but with some added Ethiopian books not followed by other Jewish groups. Their prayer service, prayer texts, and other religious books appear to be heavily influenced by medieval Ethiopian Christian sources. There is no clear evidence of a Hebrew tradition and of independent Jewish influence on the formation of Falasha Judaism. Some religious holidays of the Falasha are not marked by other Jews, and the Falasha traditionally did not celebrate post-Exilic festivals such as Hanukkah and Purim” (internet).

These are some of the reasons why people think that the Falashas may not be Jewish, but simply might be an offshoot of Christianity itself. This argument also has weaknesses, such as the fact that the Judaism witnessed is much older than the type of Judaism around at the time of the formation of Christianity. Where there is little evidence, all sorts of theories can arise.

Another interesting area of Falasha religious life that is unusual is their belief in monasticism as an inherent part of Jewish faith and practice. While this would seem a more solid argument in favor of Christian origins, we have learned in the past 200 years about a number of Jewish groups that were previously unknown, the most famous now being the Essenes.

These were a group of Jews who seemed to practice a form of religious life that represents monasticism at a time that predates Christianity. “Religious leadership was provided by “monks” and priests. These monks have disappeared since the late 1960’s, but the priests still function as liturgical and community leaders. Since the mid-twentieth century, Falasha Judaism has been much influenced by Talmudic Judaism; religious practices not in accordance with it have, for the most part, been abandoned. In Israel, the priests are retrained as spiritual leaders. They learn rabbinical law, but few attain the status of rabbi. After arrival in Israel, Falasha immigrants are familiarized with the basics of Talmudic religious law. It is the requirement of a symbolic “conversion” that has caused the most problems in Falasha social adaptation n Israel. In addition to their Judaic belief, the Falasha traditionally shared the common Ethiopian beliefs in supernatural forces and spirits. They also consult magicians; some Falasha were themselves famous magicians, who were also revered by Christians” (internet).

This is, of course, one thing that they would have had to give up in order to adjust themselves to Israeli society and Jewish religious customs, which forbids the use of magic and the practice of other traditional psychic phenomenon.

“The Falasha believe, in accordance with the tenets of the bible, in life after death, and that the dead will be resurrected at the end of days. Burial takes place as soon as possible, even before all relatives may have arrived. Death is the strongest source of ritual pollution of living persons. Those having touched the corpse must remain in isolation for several days before rejoining the community. Various relatives give eulogies on the deceased on the day of the funeral or before. There is no particular veneration of the dead, which is fairly traditional in Africa. Commemorative gatherings in honor of the dead person are held one week, one month, and one year after the burial” (internet).

The Falasha beliefs concerning death and dying are one of the arguments in favor of their Jewish heritage, as they are much more aligned with Jewish custom than they are with anything found in Ethiopia. Even today, Jewish members of the priestly family are not allowed to attend funerals except for the closest relatives and have to undergo purification rites when they do come into contact with the deceased.

Probably what is most interesting about the Falashas is that through them, we gain insight into ancient Judaism without all of the developments of theology and philosophy over many years. What would it be like for us today if we could discover a group of people calling themselves Christians who had never heard of the great Church Councils that formulated many of the key ideas of Christian doctrine in the early centuries of Christianity? Would we recognize it as Christian? I would think we probably would, but at the same time it would provide a glimpse into the way the very first Christians probably lived that is difficult for scholars to understand today.

This is because most of the known versions of Christianity, from the formality of the Orthodox to the simplicity of a Protestant Bible Church, all share certain basic beliefs about Jesus, such as that he was both fully God and fully human, a declaration that was not formalized into the creeds until hundreds of years after the time of Jesus.

Ethiopian Jews provide us with a living example that Judaism is not a racial group, but rather a shared religious culture. Jews come in all colors and in many different ethnic groups, just as Christians and Muslims do. It is all too easy for us to associate Muslims with Arabs and Christians with white Europeans, when they are actually world religions that include many different people. With Judaism it is a little more complicated, because they do associate themselves with a bloodline, but this bloodline is very old and not easy to track. In addition to that, Jews do welcome converts, so this limits the validity of the bloodline, which is not a definitive matter in determining one’s Judaism.

The modern country of Israel is an interesting study for many reasons. We can get so caught up in the modern political situation in the Middle East and all of the problems, that we can sometimes forget that outside of all of that it is an interesting sociological phenomenon.

An example of this is the revival of the Hebrew language into regular and official use. This is as astounding as if Latin were suddenly to be made into the official language of Europe again. Another interesting aspect of Israel is the way they welcome Jews from around the world. This is an ideal that still has many practical problems. Ideally, you want a melting pot situation as you have in the United States. But while all people used to be welcomed here, we also see our own racial and ethnic problems. Israel has the same problem. They have welcomed Jews from around the world, but it has not been easy to have these different groups merge. However, there are now more than 50,000 Ethiopian Jews living in Israel and very few left in Ethiopia. By all accounts, they are managing to get on with their lives and adjust to a much different culture than the one from which they came.

Coptic Christianity

Now that we have looked at a unique version of Judaism preserved in Africa, it might be interesting to take a look at Egyptian Christianity. We don’t have an early version, as you might think, because this church did not separate from the other Christian churches until a few hundred years after the time of Jesus. Nevertheless, we get an unusual look at Christianity in its formative years by studying the Coptic Orthodox Church.

All of the ancient churches try to trace themselves back directly to Christ by claiming to have been founded by one of the original disciples of Jesus. In the case of the church in Alexandria, they claim to have been founded by the disciple Mark, who at the time was believed to have been a disciple of Jesus. Modern scholars think that he was probably a disciple of Peter. Either way, he is so closely connected to Jesus that one of the Gospels is named after him.

It is also important to note that before Rome achieved prominence in the Church, there were five early centers of Christianity that shared authority later claimed by Rome alone. Alexandria was one of the five places, as was Jerusalem, Antioch, Constantinople, and Rome. We know that the Church in Alexandria was a major influence, and we also know that early monasticism flourished in the Egyptian desert. This also had an immense influence on Christian self-understanding. For these reasons alone, it is good to know something about this religious community.

“The Egyptian Orthodox Church of Alexandria is the official name for the largest Christian church in Egypt. The Church belongs to the Oriental Orthodox family of churches, and has been a distinct church body since the Council of Chalcedon in 451 A.D., when it took a different position over Christological theology from that of the Eastern orthodox and Catholic churches, then still in union. The precise differences in theology that caused the split are still disputed, and highly technical. They are mainly concerned with the Nature of Christ. The foundational roots of the Church are based in Egypt, but it has a worldwide following” (internet). That following includes a church in Monterey, California.

“The head of the church, and the See of Alexandria, is the Pope of Alexandria and the Patriarch of All Africa on the Holy See of Saint Mark, currently His Holiness Pope Shenouda III. More than 95% of Egypt’s Christians belong to the Coptic Orthodox Church of Alexandria” (internet). There is also a Coptic Catholic Church as well as a Greek Orthodox tradition, but they are very small.

“The first Christians in Alexandria were mainly Alexandrian Jews such as Theophilus, whom Saint Luke addresses in the introductory chapter of his gospel. When Saint Mark founded the church during the reign of the Roman emperor Nero, a great multitude of native Egyptians (as opposed to Greeks or Jews) embraced the Christian faith. Christianity spread throughout Egypt within half a century as is clear from the New testament writings found in Middle Egypt, which date around the year 200 A.D., and a fragment of the Gospel of John, written in Coptic, which was found in Upper Egypt and can be dated to the first half of the second century. In the second century, Christianity began to spread to the rural areas, and scriptures were translated into the local language, namely Coptic” (internet).

Theology as a formal discipline was established first in Alexandria, which has an amazing intellectual history, founded by Alexander the Great. Egyptian mystery religions flourished alongside a vibrant Jewish community and a rich philosophical community. “Around 190 A.D. the school of Alexandria became an important institution of religious learning, where students were taught by the likes of Clement and the native Egyptian Origen, who was considered the father of theology and who was also active in the field of commentary and comparative Biblical studies. Origen wrote over 6,000 commentaries on the bible among his other works” (internet).

Living in Alexandria during these years must have been like living in Florence during the Renaissance. It was the place to be if one was interested in not only the formation of Christianity, but also in the many other exciting religious movements at the time, such as Gnosticism in its Pagan, Jewish, and Christian versions.

“Many scholars such as Jerome (who translated the Bible into Latin) visited the school of Alexandria to exchange ideas and to communicate directly with its scholars. The scope of this school was not limited to theological subjects; science, mathematics and humanities were also taught there. The question-and-answer method of commentary began there, and 15 centuries before Braille, wood-carving techniques were in use there by blind scholars to read and write” (internet).

The desert fathers were important founders of what has become known as the monastic tradition, whose influence on Christianity cannot be adequately measured. Starting in the 3rd century, men (and eventually women as well) began to seek out lives of prayer and solitude as a way of dying to themselves, seeking new kind of martyrdom. As their numbers grew, it became necessary to organize them and to do so the first monastic rules were established.

These early monasteries were “instrumental in the formation of the Coptic Orthodox Church character of submission, simplicity and humility, thanks to the teachings and writings of the great fathers of Egypt’s deserts. By the end of the fifth century, there were hundreds of monasteries, and thousands of cells and caves scattered throughout the Egyptian desert. A great number of these monasteries are still flourishing and have new vocations to this day” (internet).

The importance of Egyptian thought and influence can be seen in the way church councils worked. One of the most influential councils, the Council of Nicea, was called to combat a heresy started by an Egyptian priest called Arianism. This was the teaching that Jesus did not preexist eternally with God, but was at some point created by God. This was in direct violation of what would become the Trinitarian doctrine where Christ was “begotten, not made” by God. The result of that council in 325 is the Nicene Creed, which is recited throughout the world. This creed was largely based on the teaching of another Alexandrian, Saint Athanasius of Alexandria, the chief opponent of Arius.

“In the year 381 A.D., Saint Timothy 1 of Alexandria presided over the second ecumenical council known as the Ecumenical Council of Constantinople, which completed the Nicene Creed by confirming the divinity of the Holy Spirit: “We believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the Giver of Life, …” (internet).

The Council of Chalcedon was where a break occurred. The theological issue is very technical. The real issue was one of politics and power, as it was later when the Roman Catholic and Orthodox churches split. The issue was whether Jesus had two natures, human and divine, or one. Coptic Christians said there was one nature, and the more well known teaching now says that Jesus had two natures, that he was fully God and fully man, one person but with two natures. This was more semantics than anything else, because the mystery they are trying to describe cannot be adequately rationalized by either theological position.

The official Coptic position is that “Christ is perfect in His divinity, and he is perfect in His humanity, but His divinity and His humanity were united in one nature called “the nature of the incarnate word”, which was reiterated by Saint Cyril of Alexandria. Copts, thus, believe in two natures “human” and “divine” that are united in one person “without mingling, without confusion, and without alteration.” These two natures “did not separate for a moment or the twinkling of an eye” (internet).

We know from history that the Byzantine Eastern Roman Empire ruled Egypt and the Middle East. As a result, the Egyptian church was greatly persecuted and many people were martyred rather than convert to what they considered a heresy of Greek Orthodoxy. It is one of the many sad stories in Christian history how intolerant Christians can be to one another. Despite these persecutions, the Coptics held onto their faith throughout these years. Their next challenge was the Muslim conquest of Egypt, which took place in 639.

Despite the political upheaval, Egypt remained a mainly Christian land, although the gradual conversions to Islam over the centuries changed Egypt from a mainly Christian to a mainly Muslim country by the end of the 12th century. This process was facilitated, ironically, by the Crusades and by the adoption of Arabic as the liturgical language of the church. Coptic Christians have usually thrived under Muslim rule. They were often considered second-class citizens in some ways, but they were usually unharmed and allowed to practice their faith in peace. Today there are about 15 million Coptic Christians, 11 million of which live in Egypt.

Tribal Religion

We immediately run into problems when we discuss African tribal religion, because it assumes we know what we mean by Africa and religion! These are tricky words because they are Western scholastic terms that do not necessarily apply to the indigenous traditions of Africa.

“In the West, the adjective African has generally been used in a racially oriented way to refer to the darker skinned, black peoples who live south of the Sahara Desert and have been assumed to possess the “same” culture. The mistaken assumption about the cultural sameness originated with the slave-trading colonial powers, which imagined the vast area of sub-Saharan Africa to be a single place–as if it were a single country occupied by one people. The perception of cultural uniformity, which went together with the sociopolitical notion of race, developed in the late nineteenth century and ignored the separate linguistic, cultural, and ethnic identities that African societies had developed for thousands of years and that continue to define cultural life today” (Ray, p. ix).

However, once we clarify this, we can say that Africans do share some common foundational traditions. What makes someone culturally and religiously African is still an ongoing debate in Africa today. Local groups show many distinct characteristics, but there are also things they can all relate to.

We have an example of this in our own country with the Native Americans. Each tribe thought of itself as separate. It was not until colonial people arrived that the indigenous people found themselves being grouped together as “Indians.” As the years have passed, Native Americans themselves have begun to think of themselves as a whole people with much held in common.

Perhaps most importantly, Native Americans did not start to receive justice until they could unite as a larger group. Africans are finding themselves in the same place. They want to honor their differences and local distinctions, but they are also finding that the development of a Pan-African consciousness facilitates a better life for all of them than when they are divided and try to “cut their own deals” with Western powers. It seems that today there is still resistance to Westerners lumping Africans together, but African scholars are themselves finding the term useful in new ways.

The word religion poses the same problems of definition. Africans did not have a word for religion, just as many native people around the world did not. This is because religion, as we understand the word in the West, is so much a part of daily life that it is not seen as a separate subject. Religion permeates all of life and cannot be broken down in the way scholars are used to doing.

The word religion also suffers from the fact that the earliest descriptions of African religions came from white explorers and missionaries who tended to see it in Eurocentric terms, that is, as primitive and superstitious. When we got more objective studies, much time had been lost, and the various traditional religions had changed under the influence of contact with other values and religions, especially Christianity and Islam.

“It was only in the late colonial period of the 1950’s that scholars began to use the terms religion and philosophy to characterize African religions in a positive way” (Ray, p. xi). When you think about that it is really amazing. It means that it was only in the lifetime of most of the people in this room that African religion was taken seriously!

These modern scholars “were among the first to emphasize the inherent rationality and theological integrity of African religious systems, and they employed Western philosophical ideas and theological concepts to interpret them. They also argued that the study of African religions was of great value to an understanding of the rest of the world’s religions” (Ray, p. xi).

Another problem with the Western use of the word religion is that it tends to concern “spiritual beliefs, worship of gods, and social ethics, to the exclusion of a vast area of African belief and activity devoted to sacred objects possessing mystical forces and to ritual practices with magical powers, including the large sphere of witchcraft and sorcery beliefs and procedures” (Ray, p. xii).

In other words, Western religions tend to look to transcendence and African religions tend to be more immanent. In Africa, religion and its practices are concerned not only with the worship of the gods (transcendent) “but also in a wide range of cultural creations, such as stories of origin, healing rituals, funerary rites, divination séances, public festivals, and sacred sculpture. Traditional religion is not a specialized creed separate from daily life but a diffused assemblage of sacred and moral ideas and practices that permeates all of life at the personal and social levels” (Ray, p. xii).

It is estimated today that only 10-15% of African people still practice their traditional faiths entirely, as most of Africa has now been converted to Christianity and Islam. We need to study these religions not only for their own sake, but because their values underlie the adaptation of Christianity and Islam found in Africa. Just as we saw Buddhism take on new and different aspects as it moved from India to China to Japan, so Christianity and Islam were changed by their encounter with Africa. Keeping all of this in mind, we are now ready to study some of the shared themes we find in African tribal religion.

Shared Themes in African Religion

“Prehistoric and tribal religion, the backdrop of all later religion, is a vast and complex phenomenon. But it possesses certain basic themes that, in modified forms, appear centrally in later religion as well. It is, first of all, cosmic religion–concerned with showing the relation of humankind to nature and the cosmos, it celebrates the turn of the seasons and places of special sacred power. It has myths telling of the creation of the world by Divine powers but often also adds a mythic account of a “fall” that explains why humanity is no longer as close to the creative powers as at the time of creation” (MPMF, p. 49.)

One of the common themes shared by the African religions is that they relied on an oral tradition. People spent years memorizing certain stories that were then passed down from storyteller to storyteller. With the African Religions, we study primarily symbols and rituals. “In most native cultures, spiritual lifeways are shared orally. Teachings are experienced rather than read from books” (LR, p. 26.)

It is important to keep the big picture (cosmic religion) in mind as we now go into more detail. “All of these [symbols and rituals] go together to make up a cosmos in which spirit and matter are thoroughly interwoven, and everything is more than it seems, as myth, rite, and art make the invisible visible. In this cosmos, human life is only complete in its total relationships–with family, tribe, ancestors, and all that is spirit”(MPMF, p. 30.)

This emphasis on the spiritual is a central idea of the African religions. In the world of cosmic religion, Spirit is essential and everything else derives its meaning and purpose from Spirit. “[African] religion is concerned with soul or spirit. Endeavoring to explain the diverse feelings people have within them, it sometimes tells of two or more souls. Confronting the eternal human dread of death, it describes the destiny of the soul in the afterlife: Sometimes different souls have different destinies, sometimes one at least goes to an alternative world, sometimes another aspect of the self remains around its familiar haunts as a ghost, sometimes one is reincarnated in this world. The spirits of ancestors or unappeased ghosts are usually feared and propitiated” (MPMF, p. 49.)

All of this information is passed on through stories that relate the myths of each culture. Here it is important to remember that myths do not mean lies. “Almost every religion has its stories about the dealings of the gods with humans. We call these stories myths, or poetic ways of telling great truths. Myths are ways of thinking in pictures rather than abstract concepts” (RW, p. 25.)

One of the first things you will run across in studying cosmic religion is the interest in stories, especially creation stories. “In preliterate societies, especially, a religion is sustained and explained by the transmission of its myths from generation to the next” (RW, p. 25.) Even today, many children love to be read to and hear stories, especially about their own families. M any people love films and television, because in some way they are part of that storytelling world.

Sitting in front of the television loses much of the flavor of sitting around a crackling fire listening to and telling stories, but there is some piece of it still there. People who complain about those who watch too much television are not as upset at the content of modern stories (although they may be) as they are upset at the passivity of just sitting and taking it all in.

When you don’t have a story shown to you, then you must use your imagination when you read, to picture the setting, characters, etc. Think about the huge impact modern movies, such as “Star Wars,” has had. One of the reasons is that it deals with universal themes like good and evil which have been the sources of countless stories for many thousands of years.

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