Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind

by Tom Holland

Oxford had barely been touched by bombers. Even so, there could be no relaxing. This was why, on the evening of 17 January 1944, the Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon reported to the Area Headquarters in the north of the city. John Ronald Reuel Tolkien had been serving as an air-raid warden since 1941.

In 1937, two years before the outbreak of war, Tolkien had embarked on a work of fiction which sought to hold up a mirror to this abiding Christian theme. The Lord of the Rings was deeply embedded in the culture to which he had devoted an entire lifetime of scholarship: that of early medieval Christendom.

There were also halflings named hobbits, and if these – with their large hairy feet and their comical names – seemed sprung from some nursery tale, then that was indeed how they had originated. Tolkien, though, could not rest content with writing a children’s book. His ambitions were too epic in scale.

Marshalling their languages, drawing on their literatures, merging episodes from their histories so that, together, they came to take on something of the contours of a dream, he aimed to write a fantasy that would also – in a sense acceptable to God – be true. His hope for The Lord of the Rings was that others, when they came to read it, would find truth in it too.

‘A cool doctrine of reality based on the most incisive scientific knowledge and its theoretical elucidation.’42 So Hitler had defined National Socialism, a year before invading Poland and engulfing Europe in a second terrible civil war.

Scientists, when they defined racial hierarchies for National Socialism, hesitated to define the Jews as a race at all. They were a ‘counter-race’: a virus, a bacillus. It was no more a crime to eradicate them than it was for doctors to combat an epidemic of typhus.

In 1938, a German editor wishing to publish him had written to ask if he were of Jewish origin. ‘I regret,’ Tolkien had replied, ‘that I appear to have no ancestors of that gifted people.’

If the armies of Mordor were satanic like those of Pharaoh, then Aragorn – emerging from exile to deliver his people from slavery – had more than a touch of Moses. As in Bede’s monastery, so in Tolkien’s study: a hero might be imagined as simultaneously Christian and Jewish.

In the pope’s summer residence, five hundred were given shelter. In Hungary, priests frantically issued baptismal certificates, knowing that they might be shot for doing so. In Romania, papal diplomats pressed the government not to deport their country’s Jews – and the trains were duly halted by ‘bad weather’. Among the SS, the pope was derided as a rabbi.

WW2

Elsewhere too, from France to the Balkans, and in the very Vatican itself, Catholics were often induced by their hatred of communism to view the Nazis as the lesser of two evils.

Naturally, Sauron’s dread had been that his enemies – whom he knew had found it – would turn it against him. But they did not. Instead, they destroyed the ring. True strength manifested itself not in the exercise of power, but in the willingness to give it up. So Tolkien, as a Christian, believed. It was why, in the last year of the war against Hitler, he had lamented it as an ultimately evil job.

‘For we are attempting to conquer Sauron with the Ring. And we shall (it seems) succeed. But the penalty is, as you will know, to breed new Saurons.’

The fall of Mordor, so Tolkien specified, occurred on 25 March: the very date on which, since at least the third century, Christ was believed to have become incarnate in the womb of Mary, and then to have been crucified.

Within only a few years, it had established itself as a publishing phenomenon. No other novel written over the course of the war remotely began to compare with its sales. Such success was very sweet to Tolkien. His purpose in writing The Lord of the Rings had not been a merely pecuniary one.

The novel offered Tolkien’s religion to its readers obliquely; and, had it not done so, it would never have enjoyed such unprecedented success. The world was changing. A belief in evil as Tolkien believed in it, and as Christians for so long had done, as a literal, satanic force, was weakening.

The Beatles themselves had grown up in a world scarred by war. Great stretches of Liverpool, their native city, had been levelled by German bombs. Their apprenticeship as a band had been in Hamburg, served in clubs manned by limbless ex-Nazis.

The campaign for civil rights gave to Christianity an overt centrality in American politics that it had not had since the decades before the civil war. King, by stirring the slumbering conscience of white Christians, succeeded in setting his country on a transformative new path.

love. In 1966, when Lennon claimed in a newspaper interview that the Beatles were ‘more popular than Jesus’,7 eyebrows were barely raised. Only four months later, after his comment had been reprinted in an American magazine, did the backlash hit. Pastors across the United States had long been suspicious of the Beatles.

This was especially so in the South – the Bible Belt. Preachers there – unwittingly backing Lennon’s point – fretted that Beatlemania had become a form of idolatry; some even worried that it was all a communist plot. To many white Evangelicals – shamed by the summons to repentance issued them by King, baffled by the sense of a moral fervour that had originated outside their own churches, and horrified by the spectacle of their daughters screaming and wetting themselves at the sight of four peculiar-looking Englishmen – the chance to trash Beatles records came as a blessed relief.

The band’s distinctive hairstyle – a shaggy moptop – seemed to clean-cut Klansmen a blasphemy in itself. ‘It’s hard for me to tell through the mopheads,’ one of them snarled, ‘whether they’re even white or black.’

The Beatles were not alone, that summer of 1967, in ‘turning funny’.9 Beads and bongs were everywhere. Evangelicals were appalled. To them, the emergence of long-haired freaks with flowers in their hair seemed sure confirmation of the satanic turn that the world was taking.

To campaign against discrimination on the grounds of gender or sexuality, however, was to depend on large numbers of people sharing in a common assumption: that everyone possessed an inherent worth. The origins of this principle – as Nietzsche had so contemptuously pointed out – lay not in the French Revolution, nor in the Declaration of Independence, nor in the Enlightenment, but in the Bible.

Then, in October 1971, he released a new single: ‘Imagine’. The song offered Lennon’s prescription for global peace. Imagine there’s no heaven, he sang, no hell below us. Yet the lyrics were religious through and through. Dreaming of a better world, a brotherhood of man, was a venerable tradition in Lennon’s neck of the woods. St George’s Hill, his home throughout the heyday of the Beatles, was where the Diggers had laboured three hundred years previously.

Afrikaner churchmen, incorrectly attributing to Calvin a doctrine that certain peoples were more likely to be saved than others, had enabled supporters of apartheid to view it as Christian through and through.

The pattern was a familiar one. Repeatedly, whether crashing along the canals of Tenochtitlan, or settling the estuaries of Massachusetts, or trekking deep into the Transvaal, the confidence that had enabled Europeans to believe themselves superior to those they were displacing was derived from Christianity. Repeatedly, though, in the struggle to hold this arrogance to account, it was Christianity that had provided the colonised and the enslaved with their surest voice.

‘Islam, as practised by the vast majority of people, is a peaceful religion, a religion that respects others.’32 Bush, asked to describe his own faith, might well have couched it in similar terms. What bigger compliment, then, could he possibly have paid to Muslims?

To be a Muslim, though, was to know that humans did not have rights. There was no natural law in Islam. There were only laws authored by God. Muslim countries, by joining the United Nations, had signed up to a host of commitments that derived, not from the Qur’an or the Sunna, but from law codes devised in Christian countries:

Salafists, then, even as they sought to cleanse Islam of foreign influences, could not help but bear witness to them. ‘Modern Islam,’ as the scholar Kecia Ali has put it, ‘is a profoundly Protestant tradition.’40 For a millennium, Muslims had taken for granted that the teachings of their deen were determined by the scholarly consensus on the meaning of the Qur’an and the Sunna.

Only scripture was to count. Yet the very literalness with which the Islamic State sought to resuscitate the vanished glories of the Arab empire was precisely what rendered it so inauthentic.

The executioner – revealed the following year to have been a Londoner named Mohammed Emwazi – was known to the unfortunates in his custody as ‘John’. His three fellow guards – all of them, like Emwazi, masked and speaking with English accents – were nicknamed ‘Paul’, ‘George’ and ‘Ringo’. Collectively, they were, of course, ‘the Beatles’.

A couple of decades previously, Rostock itself had been convulsed by two days of rioting against refugees. Back then, in 1992, the sight of people from distant continents on the city’s streets had been unusual. Europeans belonged to a civilisation that had long been exceptional for its degree of cultural homogeneity. For centuries, pretty much everyone – with the exception of the occasional community of Jews – had been Christian.

‘The plain was dark with their marching companies, and as far as eyes could strain in the mirk there sprouted, like a foul fungus growth, all about the beleaguered city great camps of tents, black or sombre red.’2 So Tolkien, writing in 1946, had described the siege of Minas Tirith, bulwark of the free lands of the West, by the armies of Sauron. The climax of The Lord of the Rings palpably echoed the momentous events of 955: the attack on Augsburg and the battle of the Lech.

An army of mail-clad horsemen arriving to contend the battlefield just as the invaders seemed to have victory in their grasp. A king armed with a sacred weapon, laying claim to an empty imperial throne. In 2003, a film of The Lord of the Rings had brought Aragorn’s victory over the snarling hordes of Mordor to millions who had never heard of the battle of the Lech. Burnished and repackaged for the twenty-first century, Otto’s defence of Christendom still possessed a spectral glamour.

Otto’s mantle was taken up not by the chancellor of Germany, but by the prime minister of Hungary. Victor Orbán had until recently been a self-avowed atheist; but this did not prevent him from doubting – much as Otto might have done – whether unbaptised migrants could ever truly be integrated.

Always, from the very beginnings of the Church, there had been tension between Christ’s commandment to his followers that they should go into the world and preach the good news to all creation, and his parable of the Good Samaritan. Merkel was familiar with both. Her father had been a pastor, her mother no less devout. Her childhood home had been a hostel for people with disabilities – people much like Reem Sahwil.

The West, over the duration of its global hegemony, had become skilled in the art of repackaging Christian concepts for non-Christian audiences. A doctrine such as that of human rights was far likelier to be signed up to if its origins among the canon lawyers of medieval Europe could be kept concealed.

In France – more, perhaps, than anywhere else in Europe – the story told of its origins stood at variance with its history. Laïcité, among its more fiery partisans, was valued less as a separation of church from state than as a quarantining of religion from those who might otherwise be infected by its nonsense. Charlie Hebdo defined itself proudly as ‘laïc, joyful and atheist’.

The cartoonists of Charlie Hebdo, when they mocked Christ, or the Virgin, or the saints, tended to an obscenity that owed little to Voltaire. Their true line of inheritance could be traced back instead to a far more rambunctious generation of iconoclasts. Back in the first flush of the Reformation, revellers had exulted in their desecration of idols: ducking a statue of the Virgin in a river as a witch, pinning asses’ ears to an image of St Francis, parading a crucifix through brothels, and bath-houses, and taverns.

Back in the Middle Ages, Bernard of Clairvaux – a contemporary of Abelard’s, and an abbot of such formidable sanctity that he had ended up both a saint and a Doctor of the Church – had lamented the sheer tempestuousness of male sexual need. ‘To be always with a woman and not to have sexual relations with her is more difficult than to raise the dead.’

Gandhi

The Reformation – for all the scorn with which its partisans had dismissed the ideal of chastity as monkish superstition – had served, if anything, to place an even greater premium on the sacral quality of marriage. As the Church was to Christ, so a woman was to her husband. The man who treated his wife brutally, forcing himself on her, paying no attention to her pleasure, treating her as he might a prostitute, dishonoured God. Mutual respect was all. Sex between a married couple should be ‘an holy kind of rejoicing and solacing themselves’.

Getting medieval in Pulp Fiction was something that gangsters did on people’s asses; the Old Testament was there to be misquoted as heavies filled their victims full of lead. Even when one hitman, convinced that God has personally intervened to spare him death, has a spiritual awakening, everyone else in the movie regards him with blank incomprehension.

For decades, the moral authority of the Catholic Church in America had been corroded by accusations of child abuse brought against thousands of its priests, and of cover-ups by its hierarchy. Meanwhile, among Protestants, it seemed that a televangelist had only to fulminate against sexual impropriety to be caught having an affair or arrested in a public convenience.

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.

On 5 October 2017, allegations about what Harvey Weinstein had been getting up to in his fourth-floor suite at the Peninsula broke in the New York Times. An actress meeting him there for what she had thought was a business breakfast had found the producer wearing nothing but his bespoke bathrobe. Perhaps, he had suggested, she could give him a massage?

Among the more than eighty women going public with accusations was Uma Thurman, the actor who had played Mia Wallace in Pulp Fiction, and become the movie’s pin-up.

Evangelicals had voted in large numbers for Trump. Roiled by issues that seemed to them not just unbiblical, but directly antithetical to God’s purposes – abortion, gay marriage, transgender rights – they had held their noses and backed a man who, pussy-grabbing and porn stars notwithstanding, had unblushingly cast himself as the standard-bearer for Christian values.

That the great battles in America’s culture war were being fought between Christians and those who had emancipated themselves from Christianity was a conceit that both sides had an interest in promoting. It was no less of a myth for that. In reality, Evangelicals and progressives were both recognisably bred of the same matrix.

In a country as saturated in Christian assumptions as the United States, there could be no escaping their influence – even for those who imagined that they had. America’s culture wars were less a war against Christianity than a civil war between Christian factions.

The tracks of Christian theology, Nietzsche had complained, wound everywhere. In the early twenty-first century, they led – as they had done in earlier ages – in various and criss-crossing directions. They led towards TV stations on which televangelists preached the headship of men over women; and they led as well towards gender studies departments, in which Christianity was condemned for heteronormative marginalisation of LGBTQIA+. Nietzsche had foretold it all. God might be dead, but his shadow, immense and dreadful, continued to flicker even as his corpse lay cold.

for it has been coming thick and fast. It is now clear that feathers may be at least as old as dinosaurs themselves. Tyrannosaurs had wishbones; laid eggs; had filamentous coats of fuzz. When, in an astonishing breakthrough, collagen was extracted recently from the remains of one tyrannosaur fossil, its amino acid sequences turned out to bear an unmistakable resemblance to those of a chicken.