The Plight of Western Religion
by Paul Gifford,
Hurst, 173pp, £25/$28.69
A familiar image of Western Christianity before modern times has been doing the rounds for quite a while. Back then, just about everyone took the supernatural for granted and God’s providence counted for a great deal. It was the fount of causation and it answered all the big questions.
Paul Gifford, Emeritus Professor of Religion at SOAS University of London, stresses that matters could get a little more complicated (it was not for nothing that tempers flared in 13th-century Parisian lecture halls every other day). There were squabbles aplenty: about ritual, sources of authority, the contours of free will. If you think this was a golden age of Christian concord, just take a look at the bad-mouthing endured by future pillars of the Church such as Aquinas. But the broad brushstroke remains accurate enough: God was playing the lead role, arranging the scenery and printing off the playbills. We were all enchanted, in the positive sense of the word.
