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It is not hard to understand. "Modal Christians" of pre modern trad age were not theologians, but illiterate peasants who never heard about any "creeds" and practiced their faith mixed with various village traditions and superstitions (often extremely unchristian).
Unless you are descended from unbroken line of scholars (it there ever was such thing in the West), your ancestors were not studying works of Saint Thomas, your ancestors were doing rituals to protect themselves from elves, goblins and leprechauns and were venerating saintly dog to help their sick children.
This is how real trad life looked like, and it is irretrievably lost.
(it was more tenacious you would expect. Cult of Saint Guinefort outlived French kingdom, two empires and three republics, all efforts of church and school failed to uproot it, and succumbed only to electric power, radio and television).
See also this old twitter thread with rather downer description of East European trad village (seen then as most Christian part of the world).
If your ancestors belonged to a church with creeds, they almost certainly knew it- they might not have understood it, but the illiterate villagers in rural France would hear 'Credo in Deum...' every Sunday morning. The ability to recite large portions of the mass from memory was very widespread and before very recent times, liturgical churches usually translated basic prayers into the common vernacular(which often wasn't the same as the prestige dialect formal liturgies might have a translation into) before the bible and had the peasants memorize them.
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Saint Guinefort is a legend. Don't you dare besmirch his holy name!
But yes very much agree that folk religion was different. I do wish we could go back, sometimes, just without all the disease.
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While there is some truth to your claims, some of those creeds were recited at mass every week, so I would certainly think even Mediaeval peasants would have at least heard about them.
The context of this thread also seems to be more about the institutional level, rather than what individual church members believe or practise, which indeed can often be in tension with official teachings both in modern and premodern times. And looking at the institutional level, the Nicene Creed or opposition to abortion or whatever have been shared close to universally among all Christian churches for more than a thousand years.
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I wonder how disconnected these really are. Stirner claims the death in belief of ghosts (but goblins/leprechauns/etc will do well enough) caused the mortal wound to the foundation of religion as a whole.
When you don't have this, the primary way normal pre-moderns interacted with the supernatural is lost, and intellectual religious writings have nothing to rest on.
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