Deep History, Secular Theory

21. Why Christianity Was Accepted by Romans but Not by Rome

When, some fifty years ago, Claude Lévi-Strauss proposed a science of culture (Lévi-Strauss 1967, 55), he famously argued that cultures are the products of and, consequently, reflect the structures of the human mind (Lévi-Strauss 1963, 90; Leach 1974, 2, 22). These structures, in turn, are based in the structures of the brain rather than upon, as Lévi-Strauss put it, any “inert product of the action of the environment upon an amorphous consciousness” (Lévi-Strauss 1963, 90; see also 1963, 96; 1969, 75; Leach 1974, 54, 59; Gardner 1981, 133, 161). However, in contrast to the structures of the brain, which were just beginning to be explored, (Leach 1974, 23), Lévi-Strauss focused upon ...