Max Weber: Selections in Translation

If we turn from the socially or economically privileged strata of society, we find an apparent increase in the variety of religious behaviour. Amongst the petty bourgeoisie, and in particular especially the artisan class, there are to be found the most striking contradictions side by side. It is impossible to conceive of greater contrasts between different styles of religion than those between caste taboo and the magical or mystagogic forms of religion, both sacramental and orgiastic, to be found in India, Chinese animism, Islamic dervish-religion, early Christianity, especially in the Eastern Roman Empire, with its emphasis on congregational enthusiasm and inspiration, primitive superstition coupled with Dionysiac orgiasticism in ancient Greece, Pharisaic legalism in ancient urban Judaism, the essentially idolatrous form of medieval Christianity which existed alongside all kinds of sectarianism and the various forms of Protestantism to be found in the early modern period. Early Christianity was certainly from the beginning a religion specifically for artisans. Its saviour was a small-town artisan, its missionaries itinerant journeymen; indeed, the greatest of them was an itinerant tent-maker, already so completely estranged from the land that in one of his epistles he makes blatantly absurd use of an image taken from the practice of tree-grafting. Finally, the Christian congregations of the ancient world were, as we have already seen, overwhelmingly urban and recruited mainly from the ranks of artisans, both free and unfree.