What Taylor cannot accept is how many ordinary people lived with very little religion at all, neither as believers nor as active skeptics. Some were unbelievers—apostates, heretics—while many were simple disbelievers, the religiously indifferent. In 1584 a third of Antwerp adults failed to claim any religion. This diversity is now an article of faith among social historians, but not among philosophers interested in the lettered elite. “Medieval Christians (and non-Christians and partial Christians),” Butler writes, “were almost devastatingly accustomed to huge doubts about faith. They lived through them and, perhaps more to the point, died through them. How many lives were consumed by the Albigensian crusade to rid Languedoc of the Cathar heresy in the early thirteenth century? Medieval Christians knew that faith was not axiomatic, if only because so many needed to be killed to make it so.” Butler charges Taylor with bad faith, of writing a tendentious prequel to the age he wants us to imagine.
Suffice it to say what finally broke my confidence in his work were the many problems with Taylor's historical accounts, which I found compelling when I knew nothing of the history he was writing on, but deeply flawed and misleading whenever I did. But more later.
No comments:
Post a Comment