ABSTRACT
Religious beliefs tend to change with time: within Christianity neither the potency nor the nature of belief has remained constant. In Europe in the Middle Ages many people took the Bible literally: some mediaeval priests even felt obligated to eat the vomit of a dying man who had just received the Sacrament, on the grounds that it had actually been transformed into the body of Christ (Rubin, 1991): now the bread and the wine are more usually seen as symbolic (see p. 125). According to Febvre (1982), in sixteenth-century France all private and public life was permeated by Christianity, and there was no question of choosing to be a Christian or not. Rites de passage, food prohibitions, the healing of diseases, even the granting of academic degrees, were orchestrated by religion. The words ‘rationalism’ and ‘determinism’ were simply not yet in use, and ‘scepticism’, if used, referred to the unreliability of evidence from the senses. The ‘witch-crazes’ of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were an integral part of the whole cosmology of the time. Tambiah (1990: 89-90) writes ‘Unless there occurred a social transformation, the social basis of the belief would remain, and unless there was a critical change in the whole cosmology, the beliefs would continue’. Only at the end of the seventeenth century, with the advent of modern rationalism, was
biblical fundamentalism put on the defensive, and even then only among the educated. The symbolic, poetic aspects of religion remained powerful at the popular level through into the eighteenth century, and indeed still do (Thompson, 1978). But with the Enlightenment the cognitive, intellectual, doctrinal and dogmatic aspects of Christianity came to predominate, and the Protestant rationalism which saw religion primarily as a series of beliefs was passed on to the twentieth century by the Victorians (Tambiah, 1990).
