Peasant Theology

 In the first chapter of his classic book of cultural history, The Great Cat Massacre, Robert Darnton studies a handful of folk tales in their earlier renditions, in order to get a glimpse into peasant mentalités under the Old Regime. 

He takes from these stories the conclusion that peasant life in the seventeenth century was brutish and short—that the world for these men and women was unforgiving and remorseless, and so the tales serve primarily to warn against the dangers of naively trusting one's fellow people. The only virtues they applaud—in Darnton's telling—are those of low cunning; a sort of hostile pawkiness in the presence of one's neighbors. 

But I saw something else in Darnton's own evidence. The tales he reproduces for us show also a strain of mercy that was absent from the official theologies and elite culture of the time. 

Darnton gives us one version of the "Bluebeard" legend, for instance, in which the serial killing husband of the tale has been replaced by the devil. Instead of murdering his wives, this diabolical version of Bluebeard lures them into hell through a back door, by warning them not to use a forbidden key to spy behind it (of course, none of them—not even the protagonist—can resist the all-too-human temptation to take a peek).

The protagonist of the tale, Lucia, avoids punishment for looking behind the door by tricking the devil. Eventually, she saves her sisters from hellfire as well by hiding them in laundry bags. By the end of the story, as Darnton puts it, "all the girls reach safety, using the devil himself to do the job and making a fool of him while they are at it." 

The devil in this rendition is not the Satan of theology. He is not God's agent who justly punishes humankind's first disobedience on the Lord's instructions. Instead, he is a simple-minded ogre—interchangeable with the other monsters of folklore—who can be outwitted with sufficient cleverness. 

To be sure, the fate of the wives who look behind the forbidden door can be read as a peasant's allegory for the parable of the Fall of Man. By peeking behind the forbidden door, they ate in a sense of the Tree of Knowledge. They disobeyed instructions in order to indulge their curiosity—and are now being punished eternally as a result. 

But note as well the differences between the peasant version of this tale and the one from official theology. In this version, Lucia—the stand-in for Eve and Adam—indulged the same taboo curiosity as her sisters. But she escapes punishment for it; and she does so not by being more obedient—which she certainly is not—but by outwitting the ogre whose magical commands she disobeys—who here stands in for God. 

The tale thus reveals a kind of popular theology very much at odds with pious orthodoxy. The peasants who told this version of the story took it for granted that no one deserves an eternal penalty—least of all for something as innocent and human as indulging a moment of curiosity. 

Lucia in the story is able to ransom her sisters from such a cruel punishment as a matter of course—even though orthodox theology would swear up and down that no soul can be plucked from hellfire through mere human skill. 

The peasants recognized that only a fairy tale ogre would create the arbitrary rules of the Garden of Eden and then punish humankind for obeying their own God-given desires. 

Oh, most interesting God / What folly is this? / Behold, thou hast moulded my desires / Even as thou hast moulded the apple, as Adam says in one of Stephen Crane's poems. 

Or as the village atheist puts it, in a poem from Edgar Lee Masters's Spoon River Anthology: "God lied to Adam, and destined him / to lead the life of a fool, / Ignorant that there is evil in the world as well as good. / And when Adam outwitted God by eating the apple / And saw through the lie, / God drove him out of Eden to keep him from taking / The fruit of immortal life."

The peasants of the sixteenth century sound like their own default theology was the same as Masters's freethinking Wendell P. Bloyd. They perceived the God of Theology as arbitrary, cruel, and jealous—and the focus of their theology was therefore on outfoxing this ogre, who was plainly the enemy of humankind. 

Another of the stories featured in Darnton's discussion makes this point even more overtly—without substituting God for the devil in order to give the tale a veneer of orthodoxy.

In this story, a blacksmith is described as a generous and kind-hearted man who gives to the poor, but who "had no more religion than a dog." He is a village atheist in the Spoon River mode, in short. 

Eventually, this blacksmith tricks his way into heaven, despite his unbelief, by forcing Saint Peter to dance himself to exhaustion with an enchanted fiddle and beating the angels at cards. 

Yes, this may be a celebration of pawkiness and peasant cunning, as Darnton describes it (in his view, the moral of the story is merely that "Cheating serves very well as a strategy for living. Indeed, it is the only strategy available to the 'little people'.") But it is also plainly saying something about religion. There is a moral theology here that Darnton takes too much for granted; because plainly, another lesson of the story is that love of man is more important than love of God. 

The irreligious blacksmith, let us recall, is described as "giving food and shelter to every beggar who knocks at the door," even though he is an unbeliever. He wins the listener's sympathies because he cares more about his fellow sufferers on this Earth than he does about obeying the arbitrary laws of the all-punishing, unforgiving ogre in Heaven. 

And so, the peasant feels a sense of triumph when he manages to win his way to eternal salvation regardless—through sheer cleverness. 

Still another tale featured in Darnton's essay shows just what the average French peasant made of the God of Theology. In the tale "Godfather Death," Darnton writes, "the father refuses to accept God as godfather because he observes that God favors the rich and powerful, whereas death treats everyone equally." The Brothers Grimm put a pious gloss on this passage—but the anticlerical French versions never indicate that the father must be punished for this blasphemous substitution. 

The seventeenth century peasants understood the problems of theodicy much better than the philosophers ever would, it seems. 

The orthodox theology of the day told them to bow down before a God of irrational rules and infinite penalties, who had created a world that appeared to obey no moral laws and to reward evil just as often as good. The God of the Catechism was one who had set up arbitrary laws with no obvious basis in human morality—and then punished his own creatures eternally for breaking them, when they succumbed to the very temptations God had first instilled in them.

The peasants knew that such an entity, if it existed, could only be a kind of fairy tale monster—a "being of infinite cruelty," as Bertrand Russell once put it. They recognized this character immediately from folklore, as soon as he was introduced. They knew he was the bridge troll, the ogre of legend, with his magical injunctions and inexorable irrationality. And the thing to do with all such folk monsters, as the tales indicate, is not to follow their rules—but to outfox them. 

The peasant's attitude toward the God of Theology is the instinctive response of any human heart to such atrocious ideas as infinite punishment and original sin: surely the penalty could be remitted, surely any soul could be rescued from such a fate. 

It is only through millennia of propaganda—as Moncure Daniel Conway pointed out—that the theology of the Churches was able to train this natural human response of compassion out of people—to dull their instinctive preference for mercy—to the point that they could swallow whole the monstrous teachings of orthodoxy, with its belief in an eternity of hellfire and a God that never forgives nor relents. 

As Conway puts it: "It is only the God of Theology whose vengeance never sleeps nor ends with any generation, whose wrath is fresh every day, and his hell eternal. Only when man has had his human heart dexterously removed, and has become the changeling of some vampyre Phantasm he coweringly adores, could he be the instrument of the crimes that Christianity has committed against humanity."

The peasants of the seventeenth century had plainly not yet completed that process of having their hearts fully removed. They still responded humanly to the inhuman theology they were fed at church. 

As Conway elsewhere expresses it in the same book: "This opens the way for human compassion to proffer those little mitigations of divine remorselessness which, as they gradually appear in folk-lore, are such severe, because unconscious, satires upon the deity of theology."

That, plainly, is what the peasants are doing in the tales Darnton cites. When Lucia rescues her sisters from hell by squirreling them away in a laundry sack, she is satirizing the deity who could not be bothered to pluck his own offspring from the flames—even though he could do it in an instant; merely by thought. 

When the irreligious blacksmith entered heaven through winning at a game of cards, he is revealing the truth of "Abou Ben Adhem": love of mankind is higher than love of God in the moral hierarchy. 

The ethical outlook such tales reveal is plainly richer and deeper than the mere celebration of "cheating" and low cunning that Darnton sees in them. To the contrary, they suggest that there was a popular theology that was humanistic, compassionate, and skeptical centuries before such themes could be expressed overtly in learned prose.

The peasants were already village atheists long before the days of Wendell P. Bloyd, and were indulging in satires upon orthodoxy long before Voltaire. 

In the days when learned opinion was still proscribed under penalty of death and torture from questioning whether the God of Theology was actually so just; in the days when one could be sent to the stake for doubting publicly the eternity of hellfire—"damned," as Byron once put it, "for hoping no one else may e'er be so" (viz. the fate of Bruno)—the peasants in their tales already doubted; already questioned; already felt compassion for the souls twisting hopelessly in hell. 

Their human hearts had not been so easily removed as those of the elite and literate members of society who preached to them from the pulpit every Sunday. 

Theirs were closer to the actual spirt of Christ and the Gospels, surely—if we do in fact believe that the message of Jesus had anything to do with forgiveness.