Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind

by Tom Holland

Men in particular shrank from taking the ultimate step. Admiration for Moses did not necessarily translate into a willingness to go under the knife.

Long before the coming of the Galatians, the region had been notorious for the savagery of its inhabitants, the potency of its witches, and the vengefulness of its gods. One was dreaded for rendering liars blind, or else rotting their genitals; another for punching women who offended him in the breasts.

Turkey

The Galli, men dressed as women, were servants of Cybele, the Mother Goddess who sat enthroned amid the highest peaks of Galatia; and the mark of their submission to this most powerful and venerable of all the region’s gods was the severing with a knife or a sharp stone of their testicles.

The Son of God proclaimed by Paul did not share his sovereignty with other deities. There were no other deities. ‘For us there is but one God, the Father, from whom all things came and for whom we live; and there is but one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom all things came and through whom we live.’

Paul set himself to bringing them the news of a convulsive upheaval in the affairs of heaven and earth. Once, like a child under the protection of a tutor, the Jews had been graced with the guardianship of a divinely authored law; but now, with the coming of Christ, the need for such guardianship was past.

Once, in a town called Gordium, before the coming there of the Galatians, who had adorned it with the severed heads and twisted corpses of their foes, Alexander the Great had been confronted by a celebrated wonder: a cart that for generations had been knotted to a post.

Alexander, rather than waste time trying to pick at the knot with his fingers, had severed it with his sword. Now, with his preaching that Jesus was the fulfilment of God’s plans for the world, long foretold by the prophets, Paul had achieved a similar feat.

Writing from Corinth to the churches of Rome, he freely acknowledged that Jews were not alone in having a sense of right and wrong. Other peoples too, however dimly, possessed one. How had they come by it? Since God had never given them a Law, it could only have derived ‘from nature’.

Nero, riding in his chariot, mingled with the gawping crowds. Among those put to death, so later tradition would record, were two famous names. One was Peter. The other – beheaded, as befitted a Roman citizen – was Paul.

Two little dickie birds

God, whose support the rebels had been banking upon, had failed to save his people. Many Jews, cast into an abyss of misery and despair, abandoned their faith in him altogether. Others, rather than blame God, chose instead to blame themselves, arraigning themselves on a charge of disobedience, and turning with a renewed intensity to the study of their scriptures and their laws.

the original, unsettling radicalism of Paul’s own message had been diluted. Letters written in his name and that of Peter now sternly instructed women to submit to their husbands, and slaves to obey their ‘earthly masters in everything’.

Greeks and Romans were no strangers to tales of self-sacrifice. Their more edifying histories were rife with them. A philosopher might gnaw off his own tongue and spit it in a tyrant’s face; a warrior, captured by an enemy, might demonstrate his resolve by plunging his hand into a blazing fire. Exemplars such as these had always been a feature of the Roman schoolroom.

Such was the opinion of Basilides, a Christian living in Alexandria, who taught that Jesus, when the time came for him to be crucified, had swapped his form with that of an unfortunate passer-by. ‘And Jesus had stood laughing, as the man, through ignorance and error, was crucified in his place.’

Rather than struggle to square these differences, he had instead proposed, as a means of calibrating God’s true purpose, a precise and infallible measuring device, like the chalked string used by carpenters to mark a straight line: in Greek, a canon.

Naturally, Origen did not propose that philosophy be studied as an end in itself. That, he warned his students, would be to wander for ever lost in a swamp, or a labyrinth, or a forest. Shot through with errors though the speculations of philosophers might be, they nevertheless could still help to illumine Christian truth.

It was not just Jesus who had to be integrated into the oneness of God, but his Spirit as well. The solution, by the time Origen came to this puzzle, was already clear in its outline. The unity of God came, not in spite of his Son and Spirit, but through them. One was Three; Three were One. God was a Trinity.

In the summer of 313, Carthage was a city on edge. An ancient rival of Rome for the rule of the western Mediterranean, destroyed by the legions and then – just as Corinth had been – refounded as a Roman colony, its commanding position on the coastline across from Sicily had won for it an undisputed status as the capital of Africa.

Even Constantine himself, in the final years of his life, found his loyalty to the provisions of the Nicaean Creed starting to fray. On his death in 337, he was succeeded to the rule of the eastern half of the empire by a son, Constantius, who actively rejected them, and promoted instead an understanding of Christ as subordinate to God the Father.

The entire future of humanity, so Constantine and his heirs believed, was at stake. The duty of an emperor to secure the stability of the world by practising the correct religio meant, increasingly, that theologians were as likely to feature in his concerns as generals or bureaucrats. Unless the favour of God could be secured, what value armies or taxes?

Cappadocia, a rugged landscape famed for the quality of its horses and its lettuces,

Across the Roman world, wailing at the sides of roads or on rubbish tips, babies abandoned by their parents were a common sight. Others might be dropped down drains, there to perish in their hundreds. The odd eccentric philosopher aside, few had ever queried this practice.

Aristotle himself had lent it the full weight of his prestige. Girls in particular were liable to be winnowed ruthlessly. Those who were rescued from the wayside would invariably be raised as slaves. Brothels were full of women who, as infants, had been abandoned by their parents – so much so that it had long provided novelists with a staple of their fiction. Only a few peoples – the odd German tribe and, inevitably, the Jews – had stood aloof from the exposure of unwanted children.

The poverty embraced by Martin and Paulinus was more liable to appear to them now as a fate to be avoided at all costs than an example to be followed. What they wanted from bishops and holy men was not admonishment on the inherent evil of riches, but something very different: an assurance that wealth might indeed be a gift from God. And this, sure enough, in the various barbarian kingdoms of the West, was precisely what churchmen had come to provide.

In 391, the endemic aptitude of the Alexandrian mob for rioting had turned on the Serapeum, and levelled it; four decades later, the worship of Athena had been prohibited in the Parthenon. Time would see it converted to a church.

The name of ‘pagan’, though, had soon come to have a broader application. Increasingly, from the time of Julian onwards, it had been used to refer to all those – senators as well as serfs – who were neither Christians nor Jews.

one vast and undifferentiated mass. The concept of ‘paganism’, much like that of ‘Judaism’, was an invention of Christian scholars: one that enabled them to hold up a mirror to the Church itself.

For Christians, when they sought to imagine what angels might look like, it was as natural to envisage them as bureaucrats in the service of Caesar, in medallions and crimson tunics, as it had been for the author of the Book of Job to model God’s court on that of the Persian king.

Christians, warned by Paul on no account to worship angels, had traditionally shrunk from offering Michael open honour; but increasingly, across what remained of the Roman Empire, in the eastern Mediterranean, his fame had spread. He was said to have appeared in Galatia; then near Constantinople, the great capital founded back in 330 to serve as a second Rome, in a church built by Constantine himself. Never, though, had Michael been seen in the west – until, that was, he alighted on Gargano, and proclaimed himself its guardian.

It was Origen who had pieced together the definitive account: how originally the Devil had been Lucifer, the morning star, the son of the dawn, but had aspired to sit in God’s throne, and been cast down like lightning from heaven, ‘to the depths of the pit’.10 More vividly than Persian or Jewish scholars had ever done, Christians gave evil an individual face.

A century on from Patrick’s death, the monks and nuns of Ireland still bore his stamp. They owed no duty save to God, and to their ‘father’ – their ‘abbot’.

It was forbidden them to serve in the army; to own Christian slaves; to build new synagogues. In exchange, Jews were granted the right to live according to their own traditions – but only so that they might then better serve the Christian people as a spectacle and a warning.

impregnably Christian realm. So it was, in Carthage, that the emperor’s policy was punctiliously applied. Any Jew who landed in the city risked arrest and forcible baptism. All he had to do was cry out in Hebrew when twisting an ankle, or perhaps expose himself at the baths, to risk denunciation.

It was in consternation, then, in the summer of 634, that such converts listened to startling news brought from Palestine. There, it was reported, the Jews were cheering a fresh insult to Heraclius. The province had been invaded by ‘Saracens’: Arabs. They had killed an eminent official. They were led by a ‘prophet’. Some Jews, it was true, doubted his right to this title, ‘for prophets do not come with a sword and a war-chariot’.7 Many more were afire with excitement.

Alone among the barbarian peoples who lurked beyond the borders of the Roman Empire, they featured in it. Isaac, so it was recorded in Genesis, had not been Abraham’s only son. The patriarch had also fathered a second, Ishmael, on an Egyptian slave. This meant that the Arabs – whom commentators had long since identified with the descendants of Ishmael – could claim a lineal descent from the first man to reject idolatry.

Running along both sides of the building’s arcade, a series of verses disparaged the doctrine of the Trinity. ‘The Messiah, Jesus, son of Mary, was only a messenger of God.’10 This was not merely to reopen theological debates that Christians had thought settled centuries before, but to condemn the entire New Testament, gospels and all, as a fabrication. Squabbles among those who had written it, so the Dome of the Rock sternly declared, had polluted the original teachings of Jesus.

Perhaps it was no surprise, then, that Moses, of all the figures in the Old and New Testaments, should have featured most prominently in the Qur’an. He was mentioned 137 times in all. Many of the words attributed to him had served as a direct inspiration to Muhammad’s own followers. ‘My people! Enter the Holy Land which God has prescribed for

After the city had been captured the second time, and its inhabitants slaughtered or enslaved, its conqueror razed its buildings to the ground. The masonry was then loaded into wagons and carted along the bay. There, on a hill, stood the small town of Tunis. Long in the shadow of Carthage, its time had now come.

Canterbury, a complex of Roman ruins and thatched halls in the far south-east of the island, might not have seemed the obvious seat for a bishop who claimed a primacy over the whole of Britain. It was, however, conveniently located for Rome; and it was from Rome, back in 597, that a band of monks sent by Pope Gregory had arrived in Kent.

Germanic-speaking warlords, carving out kingdoms for themselves, had seized control of the richest third of the island. Calling themselves variously Angles, or Saxons, or Jutes, they had been proudly and swaggeringly pagan.

Travelling with Theodore from Rome had come a second refugee, an African named Hadrian; and together they set up a school at Canterbury that taught both Latin and Greek.

Bede saw, more clearly than any Christian scholar before him, that there was only the one fixed point amid the great sweep of the aeons, only the single pivot. Drawing on calendrical tables compiled some two centuries earlier by a monk from the Black Sea, he fixed on the Incarnation, the entry of the divine into the womb of the Virgin Mary, as the moment on which all of history turned. Years, for the first time, were measured according to whether they were before Christ or anno Domini: in the year of the Lord.

Certainly, a pagan traveller from beyond the eastern frontiers of the Frankish empire, a Saxon or a Dane, would have found it hard to distinguish between the rival combatants on the battlefield of Poitiers. Christians and Muslims alike worshipped a single, omnipotent deity; claimed to fight beneath the watchful protection of angels; believed that they stood in a line of inheritance from Abraham.

The Arabs, after their conquest of what for millennia had been the world’s greatest concentration of imperial and legal traditions, had been faced with an inevitable challenge. How were they to forge a functioning state? Not every answer to the running of a great empire was to be found in the Qur’an.

Accordingly, when they adopted legislation from the peoples they had conquered, they did not acknowledge their borrowing, as the Franks or the Visigoths had readily done, but derived it instead from that most respected, that most authentically Muslim of sources: the Prophet himself.

At Geisner, where Thuringia joined with the lands of the pagan Saxons, there stood a great oak, sacred to Thunor, a particularly mighty and fearsome god, whose hammer-blows could split mountains, and whose goat-drawn chariot made the whole earth shake. Boniface chopped it down. Then, with its timbers, he built a church.

Not since the vanished age of the Caesars had anyone in the West commanded such resources. Prodigious both in his energies and in his ambitions, he exerted a sway that was Roman in its scope. In 800, the pope set an official seal on the comparison in Rome itself: for there, on Christmas Day, he crowned the Frankish warlord, and hailed him as ‘Augustus’. Then, having done so, he fell before Charles’ feet. Such obeisance had for centuries been the due of only one man: the emperor in Constantinople.

Charles, despite his reluctance to admit that he might owe anything to an Italian bishop, and his insistence that, had he only known what the pope was planning, he would never have permitted it, did not reject the title. King of the Franks and ‘Christian Emperor’,8 he would be remembered by later generations as Charles the Great: Charlemagne.

Countless men, women and children were led into a river, there to become Christian. Nine years later, after the crushing of yet another rebellion, Charlemagne pronounced that ‘scorning to come to baptism’10 would henceforward merit death. So too, he declared, would offering sacrifice to demons, or cremating a corpse, or eating meat during the forty days before Easter. Ruthlessly, determinedly, the very fabric of Saxon life was being torn apart.

Meanwhile, the borders of the Latin world were everywhere being made to bleed. Saracen pirates, who had long been pillaging the Italian coastline of its riches and seizing human livestock for the slave-markets of Africa, in 846 sailed up the Tiber and sacked St Peter’s itself.

In 937, a great Viking invasion of Britain was defeated by the king of Wessex, a formidable warrior by the name of Athelstan.