This chapter introduces the reader to the volumes focus upon the human-nature relationship and the role Christianity has played in shaping it. Further, it considers the challenge of terminology around words such as ‘environment, ‘nature’, and others. A rationale for the volume’s focus upon Western Christianity is also set out. Finally, this chapter presents an introductory outline of the companion.

The extent of material inequality and its relationship to economic development are central questions for historians of all periods. In recent decades, historians of ancient Greece have sought to provide the basis for answering those questions by attempting to estimate the distribution of wealth and income in Athens (and to a lesser degree in other Greek poleis) by reference to statements in ancient texts, proxy data, and simple models. While there remains much room for debate on specifics, we suggest that, for certain periods of Athenian history, very rough, but nonetheless suggestive, estimates can be offered of the distribution of wealth across the citizen population and the distribution of income across the entire population. The chapter briefly sketches ancient Greek economic performance before discussing material inequality in Greece, with special reference to Athens, and in comparison with other premodern economies. It explains how Greek political institutions and competition among individuals and states drove comparatively high levels of growth, while inequality remained comparatively low. Finally, it tests this hypothesis against some more and less familiar facts about Greek history.

This chapter offers a guide to reading Plato’s dialogues, including an overview of his corpus. We recommend first considering each dialogue as its own unified work, before considering how it relates to the others. In general, the dialogues explore ideas and arguments, rather than presenting parts of a comprehensive philosophical system that settles on final answers. The arc of a dialogue frequently depends on who the individual interlocutors are. We argue that the traditional division of the corpus (into Socratic, middle, late stages) is useful, regardless of whether it is a chronological division. Our overview of the corpus gives special attention to the Republic, since it interweaves so many of his key ideas, even if nearly all of them receive longer treatments in other dialogues. Although Plato recognized the limits inherent in written (as opposed to spoken) philosophy, he devoted his life to producing these works, which are clearly meant to help us seek the deepest truths. Little can be learned from reports of Plato’s oral teaching or the letters attributed to him. Understanding the dialogues on their own terms is what offers the greatest reward.

The chapter offers a reading of Socrates’ fourfold classification, at Philebus 23c-27c of “all the things now in the universe” into what is without limit (the apeiron), limit (peras), mixtures of these two (the meikton) and the cause of said mixtures (aitia). Contrary to the classification’s more typical treatment as a general window onto Plato’s late ontology and whatever may be its broader horizons, this classification is argued to be tailored to the project of the dialogue, directed to an analysis of the metaphysics of craft objects. In developing and explaining the classification, Socrates puts in place material for an analogy drawn from the craft of medicine to the effect that as medicine stands to health so stands some as yet unidentified craft to the good condition of soul that is the dialogue’s central focus, responsible for the happy human life. In thus articulating a framework for the historically influential idea of a craft of human living, Socrates provides a heuristic through which, in the remainder of the dialogue, the life’s character and elements may be systematically explored with a view to the dialogue’s overall contest between pleasure and intelligence.

The chapter aims to show that Plato’s engagement with mystery cults – the Eleusinian mysteries and Orphic cults in particular – can illuminate centrally important topics of Plato’s philosophy, including his conception of the philosophical life, its relation to the human good, the role of memory in the knowledge of the Forms, and the soul’s kinship to the divine. It explores why and how Plato presents philosophy as the true initiation which can fulfil the promise of the mystery cults to offer the best human life and afterlife. It analyses why and how Plato describes the knowledge of the Forms on the model of the direct encounter with the divine at the culmination of a mystery ritual. It further suggests that the ‘birth’ announced at the highest point of the Eleusinian mysteries can shed new light on the role of ‘giving birth’ at the culmination of the philosophical life in the Symposium. Finally, it shows how Pythagorean and Orphic focus on memory offered Plato a framework to develop his account of the relationship between the soul and the divine Forms, reincarnation, and the fate of our soul in the afterlife.

This chapter introduces kokomakaku, a stickfight ritual from the Dutch island of Curaçao. Documenting its evolution and development, the chapter shows how music can be used to reconstruct a possible historical, social and cultural timeline of an island. Kokomakaku embodies the cultural encounters and conflicts that mark Curaçao’s past and present, its development, likewise, representing localised struggles for status and self-definition.

Given that “Nature” is historically imbricated in the history of Christianity, the secularizing movement of modernity puts nature under intense pressure. The resulting conflicts are modeled by the United States, which authorized political revolution by invoking “the laws of Nature and of Nature’s God.” The American Transcendentalists extended nature as divine order and transcendent arbiter to authorize intellectual revolution, consolidating liberal Protestantism, European Romanticism, and modern science into a template for the meaning of nature in modernity; humans became not humble creatures in God’s creation but God’s avatars commanding all merely material beings. Today, as the resulting ecological collapse destabilizes inherited concepts of nature, “ecology” is offered as a replacement, even though ecology as a science cannot offer moral value or spiritual meaning. This intellectual history is traced through the founding work of Ralph Waldo Emerson, who offered idealism as the engine of modernity, and three followers, Orestes Brownson, Henry David Thoreau, and Margaret Fuller, who variously pluralized nature into the plenitude of material forms and beings seen as vulnerable incarnations of a higher or divine life force, prefiguring the science and ethics of ecology as an aspect of, rather than replacement for, nature.

This chapter analyses the concept of technological progress in Greek antiquity. It briefly surveys the historiography of technological progress, in particular Moses Finley’s view and its links with his view of the ancient economy, and more recent reactions to Finley. The chapter charts the idea that technology has helped humankind develop from a semi-brutish state to a more civilised condition in some classical Greek sources, including Greek tragedy, and focusses on the case-study of ancient accounts of catapults, which include a history of discovery and of cumulative improvement. The last section is devoted to the ambiguous morality of technological progress.

This chapter introduces the Big Drum through narratives of ‘return’ exploring the ritual as a medium for activating ancestral memories and crafting New World belonging. It is told through the works of two women—Lorna McDaniel and Zakia Sewell. Their works depict and speak to different Big Drum accounts of ’homecoming’, including the ritual’s promise of ancestral return.

The market in ancient Greece should be understood as a specific institutional construct, that of the city-state, which allowed its citizens to exercise private property rights guaranteed by law. By extension, free foreigners were also acknowledged these rights, which however extended to the private ownership of human beings (slavery). The city-state also created the conditions for an unusually high division of labour. Each city was a market space of its own, with its own rules and logic, which could include the control over sales margins and even sometimes the establishment of maximum prices for some perishable fresh goods. The network of hundreds of Greek city-states also created the conditions for the development of an original form of international market.

The “occult world,” or occulture, is a term that has developed a very wide meaning in modern academic discourse. The full panoply of occult thinking is enormous. While always mindful of the broader definition of the subject, this essay is largely limited to what the author believes would be an acceptable vernacular definition of the occult as essentially referring to black magic, and most especially to the satanic. This has been a subject with enormous resonance for American history and culture. The argument in this chapter is that Satan has played, and continues to play, a central – and on occasion a decisive – role in American cultural and political life. He is a figure deeply in the American grain, a vivid and personal presence in the lives of many millions of Americans, given powerful and recurring embodiment in American popular culture, in particular. But he is also a presence centrally informing some of the classic works of American literature.