Title: Baptism and change in the early Middle Ages, c. 200-c. 1150
Description: 'It is surely a marvel that death is washed away in a bath.' So Tertullian saw in baptism a striking example of the paradox central to the Christian idea. Ambrose, a very different spirit, showed how this tension between mere water and salvation is very close to the desire which forms belief. This book makes a number of studies of different interpretations of baptism, as a way of showing how the force of sacrament comes less from its formal authority than from the understanding it calls upon.

Indeed, it suggests that baptism was one of the central acts by which men and women in the Middle Ages perceived the world in which they lived.

But the variety of understandings is also the variety conferred by change; so there is a story to tell, too, of the beginnings of baptism in the 'crisis' of Late Antiquity through the long period up to the eleventh century when the baptism of a small child became one of the great moments at which the infinite is brought into a fragment of the finite, to the time, in the mid-eleventh century, when the sense of so dramatic an operation begins to become puzzling.

In the puzzlement, most clearly expressed in the debate over the whereabouts of the body in the eucharist, there is a loss of innocence: the innocence of the sacramental symbol. In the tentative theology of Abelard we can see some of the anxiety which comes of loss.

It is akin to the anxiety of 'not quite getting there' which Abelard finds in the pagan philosophers of Antiquity, whose knowledge was not yet made good by revelation; whose wish to be baptized was, as it were, not yet accomplished by baptism itself.
Subjects: Baptism, History, Civilization, medieval
Time periods: Early church, ca. 30-600, Middle Ages, 600-1500