Gargantua And Pantagruel

Religion is central to the language, narrative, and aim of the books: Rabelais invokes God in all his Prologues, uses allusions and narrative conventions from the Bible, debates the question of right faith, satirizes the current condition of the Church, and presents his model of the ideal Christian religion through figures like Pantagruel, Gargantua, Grandgousier, and Friar Jean. At the heart of all his inquiries is the question of how to build a reformed, humanist Christian faith that is in continuum with the religion and philosophy of antiquity, while rejecting what Rabelais depicts as the Church’s corrupt practices.

References to biblical conventions include Pantagruel’s genealogy in Book 1, Chapter 1, written in the style of such genealogies in the Old Testament. Rabelais shows through the list of Pantagruel’s antecedents that nothing was above satire for him, not even his own faith. In Book 1, Chapter 8, Gargantua writes a letter to Pantagruel that is filled with Christian lessons, such as “you should serve, love, and fear God […] by faith informed with charity, live conjoined to Him in such a way as never to be cut off from Him by sin” (49).