Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind

by Tom Holland

‘There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.’20

After all, the truth of his message had been vouchsafed for him by Christ himself: not only on the road to Damascus, but on a subsequent occasion as well, in a vision of heaven, where he had heard ‘inexpressible things, things that man is not permitted to tell’.

‘No one can truly do duty to God,’ he declared, ‘who does not think like a philosopher.’

How, when Christians accorded Jesus a status that was somehow divine, could they possibly claim to worship only the single god?

The judicial execution in 258 of Carthage’s most celebrated bishop, a noted scholar by the name of Cyprian, had confirmed them in a peculiarly militant understanding of their faith. Purity was all. There could be no compromising with the evils of the world. Belief was nothing if it was not worth dying for.

century after Caracalla’s grant of citizenship to the entire Roman world, Constantine had hit upon a momentous discovery: that the surest way to join a people as one was to unite them not in common rituals, but in a common belief.

‘Get rid of pride, and riches will do no harm.’

The Revelation of Saint John – whom Irenaeus, for one, had confidently identified with the disciple beloved of Jesus – offered the ultimate account of the judgement that was to come. Like a troubled dream, it provided no clear narrative, but rather a succession of haunting and hallucinatory visions. Of war in heaven, between Michael and his angels and ‘that ancient serpent called the devil, or Satan, who leads the whole world astray’.19 Of how Satan would be cast down and bound for a thousand years. Of how martyrs, raised from the dead and given thrones, were to reign with Christ for the length of the millennium. Of a whore drunk with the blood of the saints, who sat on a scarlet beast, and whose name was Babylon. Of how a great battle would be fought at the place ‘that in Hebrew is called Armageddon’.20 Of how Satan, after the thousand years had passed, was to be released, and would deceive the four corners of the earth, before being thrown for ever into a lake of burning sulphur. Of how the dead, great and small, would stand before the throne of Christ, and be judged, according to what they had done. Of how some would be written in the book of life, and some – those who did not appear in its pages – would be cast into the lake of fire. Of how there would be a new heaven and a new earth. Of how the Holy City, the new Jerusalem, would descend out of heaven from God. Of how heaven and earth would become one.

Those who lacked the Christian understanding of history, so Augustine had written, were doomed to ‘wander in a circuitous maze finding neither entrance nor exit’.

Leaders of the Church had long dreaded the speculations that St John’s vision of the Apocalypse might foster among those given to wild and violent imaginings.

Things caught up in the flux of mortals’ existence, bounded by their memories, forever changing upon the passage of the generations: all these, so Augustine declared, were saecularia – ‘secular things’.33

Muslims were not a beleaguered minority, prey to the bullying of Christian emperors and kings.

Listed as an official decree of the council held at Clermont, it promised warriors a means by which their trade of arms, rather than offending Christ and requiring penance to be forgiven, might itself serve to cleanse them of their sin. ‘For, if any man sets out from devotion, not for reputation or monetary gain, to liberate the Church of God at Jerusalem, his journey shall be reckoned in place of all penance.’18

A supreme paradox: that the Church, by rending itself free of the secular, had itself become a state.

The truest miracle was not the miraculous, but the opposite: the ordered running of heaven and earth.

Rather than treating them as his predecessors had treated the Waldensians, he ordained them a legally constituted order of the Church. ‘Go, and the Lord be with you, brethren, and as He shall deign to inspire you, preach repentance to all.’

They charged him with believing every accusation that was brought before him; of rushing the process of law; of sentencing the innocent to the flames. No one, though, was innocent. All were fallen. Better to suffer as Christ had suffered, tortured in a place of public execution for a crime that he had not committed, than to suffer eternal damnation. Better to suffer for a few fleeting moments than to burn for all eternity.

peoples through the character of their clothing’.42 Christian artists, for the first time, began to represent Jewish men as physically distinctive: thick-lipped, hook-nosed, stooped. In 1267, sexual relations between Jews and Christians were banned by formal decree of a church council; in 1275, a Franciscan in Germany drew up a law code that made it a capital offence. In 1290, the king of England, pushing the logic of this baneful trend to its ultimate conclusion, ordered all the Jews in his kingdom to leave for good. In 1306, the king of France followed suit.* A Church that proclaimed itself universal had, it seemed, no response to those who rejected it, save persecution.

Woman, so one Dominican thundered, was ‘the confusion of man, an insatiable beast, a continuous anxiety, an incessant warfare, a daily ruin, a house of tempest, a hindrance to devotion’.

‘The female,’ Aristotle had written, ‘is, as it were, an inadequate male.’

Mary Magdalene, a follower of Jesus cured by him of possession by demons, had initially mistaken the risen Christ for the gardener

That marriage was a sacrament, a visible symbol of God’s grace, was a doctrine that it had taken the Church many centuries to bring Christians to accept. The assumption that marriage existed to cement alliances between two families – an assumption as universal as it was primordial – had not easily been undermined.

Opening up before the Christian people was the path to a radical new conception of marriage: one founded on mutual attraction, on love. Inexorably, the rights of the individual were coming to trump those of family. God’s authority was being identified, not with the venerable authority of a father to impose his will on his children, but with an altogether more subversive principle: freedom of choice.

Innocent III, that most formidable of heresy’s foes, never forgot that his Saviour had kept company with the lowest of the low: tax-collectors and whores.

In 1409, a council of bishops and university masters, meeting in Pisa, had declared both rival popes deposed, and crowned a new candidate of its own – but this, far from delivering Christendom a single pope, had merely left it stuck with three.

that holy dove which, at Jesus’ baptism, had descended upon him from heaven.

That the kingdoms of the Indians were legitimate states; that Christianity should be imposed, not by force, but solely by means of persuasion; that neither kings, nor emperors, nor the Church itself had any right to ordain their conquest: here, in Cajetan’s opinion, were the principles fit to govern a globalised age.

Salvation was not a reward. Salvation was a gift.

Every claim by a reformer to an authority over his fellow Christians might be met by appeals to the Spirit; every appeal to the Spirit by a claim to authority.

serve as the light of the world – as a city upon a hill?

When, during the course of their second winter, the Pilgrims found unregenerates celebrating Christmas Day by playing cricket, they promptly confiscated their bats.

A demand for empirical evidence had gone head to head with wild supposition – and the demand for empirical evidence had won. That, at any rate, was how it appeared to the Inquisition. Speculation that the earth revolved around the sun continued to be perfectly licit; nor – despite the urging of the committee established to investigate it – was heliocentrism itself condemned as heretical. Only provide proof, Bellarmino had assured Galileo, and the Church would reconsider its opinion. ‘But I will not believe that there is such a demonstration, until it is shown me.’29 This, to Galileo’s frustration, was a challenge he found himself unable to meet.

Wittgenstein

‘A liberty of judgment is pretended, and queries are proposed, until nothing certain be left, nothing unshaken.’8

The true victory in the war against the king had gone not to parliament, but to the army.

went far beyond anything the papacy had ever sanctioned. The Jews, he had demanded, should be rounded up, housed beneath one roof, put to hard labour. Their prayer books, their Talmuds, their synagogues: all should be burned. ‘And whatever will not burn should be buried and covered with dirt, so that no man will ever again see so much as a stone or cinder of them.’19

True enlightenment derived from reason.

To Protestants, the essence of religion appeared clear: it lay in the inner relationship of a believer to the divine. Faith was a personal, a private thing. As such, it existed in a sphere distinct from the rest of society: from government, or trade, or law.

Nevertheless, to officials in India possessed of a scholarly turn of mind, intrigued by the ancient land they found themselves administering, and forever conscious of just how different it was to their own, the conviction that such a thing as a ‘Hindoo religion’ existed was simply too useful to abandon. In ancient Greece, the story had been told of a robber named Procrustes, who, after inviting a guest to lie down on a bed, would then rack his limbs or amputate them, as required to ensure a trim fit. It was in a very similar spirit that British scholars, confronted by all the manifold riches, complexities and ambivalences of Indian civilisation, set to shaping out of them something that might be recognisable as a religion.

Despite the change to its charter, it remained reluctant to interfere in the religious practices of its Hindu subjects. What, though, if it could be proven that suttee was not a religious practice? The question, of course, was one that would have made no sense at all before the coming of the British to India; but increasingly, after decades of rule by the Company, there were Indians who understood its implications well enough. Hindus who used words such as religion, or secular, or Hinduism were not merely displaying their fluency in English. They were also adopting a new and alien perspective on their country, and turning it to their advantage.

to abandon the weak and the poor to their fate as ‘evil’.15 The instincts that had fostered a concern for the disadvantaged must themselves, he noted, have been the product of natural selection.

he yearned to see it professionalised. Not only would the rout of ‘Theology & Parsondom’21 lead to more opportunities for men like himself – self-educated, middle class, contemptuous of privilege

Even as some trained telescopes on Mars or sought to track the passage of invisible rays, others were turning their attentions to the bedroom.

William Graham Sumner, a professor at Yale, had once felt a calling to the ministry; but the experience of serving as a clergyman had led him to reject the Church’s teachings on poverty. ‘In days when men acted by ecclesiastical rules these prejudices produced waste of capital, and helped mightily to replunge Europe into barbarism.’37 If only Columbanus, rather than skulking profitlessly in woods, had set up a business. If only Boniface, rather than haranguing pagans, had brought them the good news of free trade. Here was teaching of which Carnegie was proud to consider himself a disciple.

On 12 May 1905, Carnegie was in London, where the 292 bones of the first Diplodocus cast ever to be assembled into a single skeleton were ready to be unveiled to an aristocratic array of dignitaries.

A beard, he had once joked, was something ‘without which no prophet can succeed’.

‘Such phantoms as the dignity of man, the dignity of labour’:

‘He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster. And when you gaze long into an abyss the abyss also gazes into you.’52 Nietzsche, a man who had renounced his citizenship, despised nationalism, and praised the Jews as the most remarkable people in history,

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.

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.

As in the days of Darwin and Huxley, so in the twenty-first century, the ambition of agnostics to translate values ‘into facts that can be scientifically understood’29 was a fantasy. It derived not from the viability of such a project, but from medieval theology. It was not truth that science offered moralists, but a mirror. Racists identified it with racist values; liberals with liberal values. The primary dogma of humanism – ‘that morality is an intrinsic part of human nature based on understanding and a concern for others’30 – found no more corroboration in science than did the dogma of the Nazis that anyone not fit for life should be exterminated. The wellspring of humanist values lay not in reason, not in evidence-based thinking, but in history.