ABSTRACT
One of the most fundamental oppositions among Christians is between those who see faith as a kind of good gullibility, and those who, turning to the Greek of their New Testaments, see faith as trust, as confidence in God and his promises. Between Pantagruel and Gargantua Rabelais made his Christian laughter much more accessible to a public which was not educated in Latin. The Reformation hinged on such matters. There were churchmen prepared to anathematize or kill over that question. Rabelais preferred to laugh, while making his point quite firmly: christian faith is not the ability to swallow old wives' tales or tall stories. Laughter in Gargantua warns the great and good that if society is mad enough to leave a young aristocrat to his own devices in the hands of lubricious peasant women and ignorant, canting, snotty, syphilitic old dons, he can readily be turned into a yokel himself, mad and coarse.
