Quote by Zera Yacob: “God created us with reason so that we may seek truth.”

This is a seventeenth-century Ethiopian argument that human rationality is not a secular threat to faith but a divine gift designed for it. We are meant to think, question, and seek — not to accept falsehood because it is familiar or comforting. Reason and faith, here, are allies.

Zera Yacob wrote the Hatata in 1667 while living in a cave near Axum in Ethiopia, having fled political and religious persecution. Europe was in the early decades of its Enlightenment, but Yacob developed his rationalist philosophy independently, rooted in Ethiopian Christian and intellectual tradition.

Ethiopian philosopher of the seventeenth century whose Hatata — written around 1667 — presented a rational, empirical philosophy of ethics and religion independent of any European Enlightenment influence. He is considered one of the first African rationalist philosophers and remains under-read in Western philosophy curricula.