Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind

by Tom Holland

Increasingly, then, the separation of church from state was an upheaval manifest across the whole of Christendom. Wherever a priest was called upon to minister to the laity, even in the humblest, the most isolated village, there the impact of reformatio could be felt. The establishment of the Roman Church as something more than merely a first among equals, as ‘the general forum of all clergy and all churches’,21 gave clerics across the Latin West a common identity that they had not previously possessed. In the various kingdoms, fiefdoms and cities that constituted the great patchwork of Christendom, something unprecedented had come into being: an entire class that owed its loyalty, not to local lords, but to a hierarchy that exulted in being ‘universal, and spread throughout the world’.

good one

‘By doubting we come to inquiry, and by inquiry we perceive the truth.’34 Here was the maxim that defined Abelard’s entire theology – and enabled him to promise his students an understanding more profound than that of the Church Fathers themselves.

In 1323, the seal was set on his reputation when the pope proclaimed him a saint. The result was to enshrine as a bedrock of Catholic theology the conviction that revelation might indeed co-exist with reason. A century after the banning in Paris of Aristotle’s books on natural philosophy, no one had to worry that the study of them might risk heresy. The dimensions that they had opened up – of time, and of space, and of the unchanging order of the stars – were rendered as Christian as scripture itself.

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Back in ancient times, when the statue of Venus retrieved from a building site in Siena had been worshipped as a portrait of a living goddess, the word familia had signified a vast and sprawling household. Clans, dependents, slaves: all were family. But that had changed. The Church, in its determination to place married couples, and not ambitious patriarchs, at the heart of a properly Christian society had tamed the instinct of grasping dynasts to pair off cousins with cousins. Only relationships sanctioned by canons were classed as legitimate. No families were permitted to be joined in marriage except for those licensed by the Church: ‘in-laws’. The hold of clans, as a result, had begun to slip. Ties between kin had progressively weakened. Households had shrunk. The fabric of Christendom had come to possess a thoroughly distinctive weave. Husbands, wives, children: it was these, in the heartlands of the Latin West, that were increasingly coming to count as family.

Yet in truth, the Theological-Political Treatise was a book that only a man utterly saturated in Protestant assumptions could ever have written. What rendered it so unsettling to the Dutch authorities was less that it served as a repudiation of their beliefs than that it pushed them to a remorseless conclusion. Spinoza’s genius was to turn strategies that Luther and Calvin had deployed against popery on Christianity itself. When he lamented just how many people were ‘in thrall to pagan superstition’,34 when he dismissed the rituals of baptism or the celebration of feast-days as mere idle ‘ceremony’,35 and when he lamented that the original teachings of Christ had been corrupted by popes, he was arguing nothing that a stern Reformed pastor might not also have argued. Even the most scandalous of his claims – that a belief in miracles was superstitious nonsense, and that a close reading of scripture would demonstrate it to have been of human rather than divine origin – were merely Protestant arguments pushed to a radical extreme.

sad but true

Voltaire, when he sketched a portrait of Calas broken on the wheel, could not help but evoke in the imaginings of his readers the image of Christ on the cross. The standards by which he judged Christianity, and condemned it for its faults, were not universal. They were not shared by philosophers across the world. They were not common from Beijing to Cayenne. They were distinctively, peculiarly Christian.

great point about Voltaire

Darwin, however, his theory of natural selection suggested a rather different answer. As a young man, he had sailed the seas of the world, and he had noted how, ‘wherever the European has trod, death seems to pursue the aboriginal’.18 His feelings of compassion for native peoples, and his matching distaste for white settlers, had not prevented him from arriving at a stark conclusion: that there had come to exist over the course of human existence a natural hierarchy of races.

darwin

Except that the freedom to fuck when and as one liked had tended to be, in antiquity, the perk of a very exclusive sub-section of society: powerful men. Zeus, Apollo, Dionysus: all had been habitual rapists. So too, in the Rome to which Paul had travelled with his unsettling message of sexual continence, had been many a head of household. Only the titanic efforts of Christian moralists, the labour of a millennium and more, had managed to recalibrate this. Their insistence on marriage as the only legitimate way to obtain erotic fulfilment had prevailed. ‘Do you not know,’ Paul had demanded of the Corinthians, ‘that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God?’20 This was the message, two thousand years later, that continued to be thundered forth from pulpits across America: the warning that sexual desire, implicated as it was in the cosmic battle between good and evil, was far too predatory, far too rapacious, ever to be left to its own devices. But it was also a message that, in the offices of men who had their fingers on the pulse of popular entertainment, who knew what sold a movie, tended to be regarded with, if not contempt, then incomprehension. Sexual repression was boring – and to be boring was box-office death.