Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind

by Tom Holland

That a man who had himself been crucified might be hailed as a god could not help but be seen by people everywhere across the Roman world as scandalous, obscene, grotesque.

Even as the western half of the empire began to slip away from the rule of the Caesars, and fall to barbarian invaders, so in the eastern half, where Roman power endured, the Cross provided assurance to an embattled people that victory would ultimately be theirs. In Christ’s agonies had been the index of his defeat of evil. This was why, triumphant even on the implement of his torture, he was never shown as suffering pain. His expression was one of serenity. It proclaimed him Lord of the Universe.

No ancient artist would have thought to honour a Caesar by representing him as Caravaggio represented Peter: tortured, humiliated, stripped almost bare. And yet, in the city of the Caesars, it was a man broken to such a fate who was honoured as the keeper of ‘the keys of the kingdom of heaven’.21 The last had indeed become first.

Whether in Korea or in Tierra del Fuego, in Alaska or in New Zealand, the cross on which Jesus had been tortured to death came to serve as the most globally recognised symbol of a god that there has ever been. ‘Thou hast rebuked the nations, thou hast destroyed the wicked; thou hast blotted out their name for ever and ever.’23 The man who greeted the news of the Japanese surrender in 1945 by quoting scripture and offering up praise to Christ was not Truman, nor Churchill, nor de Gaulle, but the Chinese leader, Chiang Kai-shek. Even in the twenty-first century, as the tide of Western dominance palpably retreats, assumptions bred of Europe’s ancestral faith continue to structure the way that the world organises itself. Whether in North Korea or in the command structures of jihadi terrorist cells, there are few so ideologically opposed to the West that they are not sometimes obliged to employ the international dating system. Whenever they do so, they are subliminally reminded of the claims made by Christianity about the birth of Jesus. Time itself has been Christianised.

Already, by the time that Anselm died in 1109, Latin Christendom had been set upon a course so distinctive that what today we term ‘the West’ is less its heir than its continuation. Certainly, to dream of a world transformed by a reformation, or an enlightenment, or a revolution is nothing exclusively modern. Rather, it is to dream as medieval visionaries dreamed: to dream in the manner of a Christian.

Today, at a time of seismic geopolitical realignment, when our values are proving to be not nearly as universal as some of us had assumed them to be, the need to recognise just how culturally contingent they are is more pressing than ever. To live in a Western country is to live in a society still utterly saturated by Christian concepts and assumptions.

For a millennium and more, the civilisation into which I had been born was Christendom. Assumptions that I had grown up with – about how a society should properly be organised, and the principles that it should uphold – were not bred of classical antiquity, still less of ‘human nature’, but very distinctively of that civilisation’s Christian past.

cut off both his nose and his ears, and put out one of his eyes, and kept him bound at my palace entrance, where all could see him.’ So Darius had boasted, detailing his treatment of one particularly noxious rebel. ‘Then I had him impaled.’2 Not every victim of the Great King’s anger, though, was necessarily suspended and exposed as he died. The Greeks reported in hushed tones of disgust one particularly revolting torture: the scaphe, or ‘trough’. The executioner, after placing his victim inside a boat or hollowed-out tree trunk, would then attach a second one over the top of it, so that only the wretched man’s head, hands and feet were left sticking out. Fed continuously with rich food, the criminal would have no choice but to lie in his own excrement; smeared all over with honey, he would find himself powerless to brush away the buzzing flies. ‘Worms and swarms of maggots were bred of the rottenness and the putrefaction of the excrement; and these, eating away at his body, bored into his intestines.’3 The victim would finally expire only once his flesh and organs had been almost entirely consumed. One man, so it was reliably reported, had endured the scaphe for seventeen days before finally breathing his last.

Fearsome deities such as these were perfectly at home amid the wilds. Bands of itinerant priests, dancing as they travelled, and playing flutes and kettle-drums, were a common sight on Galatian roads. Some were famed for working themselves up into a lather of prophecy by indulging in spectacular orgiastic rites; but there could be no copulation for the most celebrated of them all. 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.

Unsurprisingly, then, in his determination to combat the ‘false brothers’25 and their teachings, he did not pull his punches. ‘I wish they would go the whole way, and castrate themselves!’26 Scabrous and bitter, the joke dramatised for the Galatians the twin perils that Paul dreaded now threatened them. Circumcision was little better than castration. To submit to the Law of Moses would be as sure a betrayal of Christ as to take to the roads in praise of Cybele.

Since God had never given them a Law, it could only have derived ‘from nature’.44 This, for a Jew, was an astonishing acknowledgement to make. The concept of natural law had no place in Torah. Yet Paul – as he struggled to define the law that he believed, in the wake of the crucifixion and the resurrection, to be written on the heart of all who acknowledged Christ as Lord – did not hesitate to adapt the teachings of the Greeks. The word he used for it – syneidesis – clearly signalled which philosophers in particular he had in mind. Paul, at the heart of his gospel, was enshrining the Stoic concept of conscience.

That the law of the God of Israel might be read inscribed on the human heart, written there by his Spirit, was a notion that drew alike on the teachings of Pharisees and Stoics – and yet equally was foreign to them both.

In the great parties thrown by Nero for the Roman people, the subversion of tradition sponsored by the emperor had manifest limits. The nobleman’s daughter obliged to work as a prostitute, and serve whoever might demand to use her, was the emblem of a brute truth that most in the capital took for granted: the potency of a Roman penis. Sex was nothing if not an exercise of power. As captured cities were to the swords of the legions, so the bodies of those used sexually were to the Roman man. To be penetrated, male or female, was to be branded as inferior: to be marked as womanish, barbarian, servile. While the body of a free-born Roman was sacrosanct, those of others were fair game. ‘It is accepted that every master is entitled to use his slave as he desires.’

the presumptions that underlay this, however, Paul brought a radically different perspective. ‘Do you not know that your bodies are members of Christ himself?’52 So he had demanded of the Corinthians. How could any man, knowing his limbs consecrated to the Lord, think to entwine them with those of a whore, mingle his sweat with hers, become one flesh with her? But Paul, by proclaiming the body ‘a temple of the Holy Spirit’,53 was not merely casting as sacrilege attitudes towards sex that most men in Corinth or Rome took for granted. He was also giving to those who serviced them, the bar girls and the painted boys in brothels, the slaves used without compunction by their masters, a glimpse of salvation.

commanded him, ‘Feed my sheep.’67 So ended a gospel that had begun with the Word that was with God, and was God, at the moment of creation: beside a barbecue on the shores of a lake.

To Irenaeus, who in his native Asia had sat at the feet of Polycarp, and in Rome had traced whole generations of bishops back to the time of Peter, the continuity of his beliefs with the primordial beginnings of the Church appeared self-evident. He did not claim any privileged source of wisdom. Just the opposite. Irenaeus, in his attempt to define orthodoxy, was defiantly contemptuous of radical speculations. The Church that he defended rested on foundations that spanned the entire Roman world. Decades earlier, while travelling through Asia Minor on his way to Rome, Ignatius, a bishop from Syria, had proudly defined it as katholikos: ‘universal’.20 This – the catholic Church – was the one with which Irenaeus identified.

The feat of Irenaeus, labouring in the wake of their deaths, was to give substance and solidity to these convictions. Already, within his own lifetime, his achievements and those of Christians who thought like him were becoming apparent even to hostile observers. They led an organisation that, in its scale and scope, was not merely one among a crowd of churches, but something altogether more imposing: the ‘Great Church’.27 Never before had there been anything quite like it: a citizenship that was owed not to birth, nor to descent, nor to legal prescriptions, but to belief alone.

It was Ignatius, a century before Origen, who had first given it the name that would endure for ever after.34 Christianismos, he had called it: ‘Christianity’.

Christianity, in Origen’s opinion, was not merely compatible with philosophy, but the ultimate expression of it. ‘No one can truly do duty to God,’ he declared, ‘who does not think like a philosopher.’

When Irenaeus described teachers such as Basilides as ‘Gnostics’, he was identifying as their defining characteristic their claim to be better informed than everyone else. ‘Tradition they scorn, insisting that they know things that neither the elders of the Church knew, nor even the apostles – for they alone have identified the unadulterated truth.’

Constantine’s predecessors, with their attempts to appease the heavens by offering them their ancient dues of sacrifices and honours, had grievously misunderstood what was required of an emperor. ‘It matters not how you worship, but what you worship.’59 True religio, Constantine was coming to understand, was a matter less of ritual, less of splashing altars with blood or fumigating them with incense, than of correct belief.

Constantine, by accepting Christ as his Lord, had imported directly into the heart of his empire a new, unpredictable and fissile source of power.

The shock of this cut Flavius Claudius Julianus to the quick. The nephew of Constantine, he had been raised a Christian, with eunuchs set over him to keep him constant in his faith. As a young man, though, he had repudiated Christianity – and then, after becoming emperor in 361, had committed himself to claiming back from it those who had ‘abandoned the ever-living gods for the corpse of the Jew’.1 A brilliant scholar, a dashing general, Julian was also a man as devout in his beliefs as any of those he dismissively termed ‘Galileans’.

Behind the selfless ascetics of Julian’s fantasies there lurked an altogether less sober reality: priests whose enthusiasms had run not to charity, but to dancing, and cross-dressing, and self-castration. The gods cared nothing for the poor. To think otherwise was ‘airhead talk’.

Certainly, there was little in the character of the gods whom Julian so adored, or in the teachings of the philosophers whom he so admired, to justify any assumption that the poor, just by virtue of their poverty, had a right to aid. The young emperor, sincere though he was in his hatred of ‘Galilean’ teachings, and in regretting their impact upon all that he held most dear, was blind to the irony of his plan for combating them: that it was itself irredeemably Christian.

Divine love for the outcast and derelict demanded that mortals love them too. This was the conviction that in 369, on the outskirts of a Caesarea ravaged by famine, prompted Basil to embark on a radical new building project. Other Christian leaders before him had built ptocheia, or ‘poor houses’ – but none on such an ambitious scale. The Basileias, as it came to be known, was described by one awe-struck admirer as a veritable city, and incorporated, as well as shelter for the poor, what was in effect the first hospital.

Gregory was moved by the existence of slavery not just to condemn the extremes of wealth and poverty, but to define the institution itself as an unpardonable offence against God. Human nature, so he preached, had been constituted by its Creator as something free. As such, it was literally priceless. ‘Not all the universe would constitute an adequate payment for the soul of a mortal.’9 This, for his congregation, was altogether too radical, too seditious a perspective to take seriously: for how, as Basil himself put it, were those of inferior intelligence and capabilities to survive, if not as slaves? Unsurprisingly, then, Gregory’s abolitionism met with little support. The existence of slavery as damnable but necessary continued to be taken for granted by most Christians – Basil included. Only when heaven was joined with earth would it cease to exist. Gregory’s impassioned insistence that to own slaves was ‘to set one’s own power above God’s’,10 and to trample on a dignity that was properly the right of every man and woman, fell like seed among thorns.

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. Indeed, there were cities who by ancient law had made a positive virtue of it: condemning to death deformed infants for the good of the state. Sparta, one of the most celebrated cities in Greece, had been the epitome of this policy, and 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. Pretty much everyone else had always taken it for granted. Until, that was, the emergence of a Christian people.

When famine held Cappadocia in its grip, and ‘flesh clung to the bones of the poor like cobwebs’,11 then Macrina would make a tour of the refuse tips. Those infant girls she rescued she would take home, and raise as her own. Whether it was Macrina who had taught Gregory, or Gregory Macrina, both believed that within even the most defenceless newborn child there might be glimpsed a touch of the divine.

Muslims were not a beleaguered minority, prey to the bullying of Christian emperors and kings. They had conquered a vast and wealthy empire, and aspired to conquer yet more. Had Francia gone the way of Africa, and been lost for good to Christian rule, then the Franks too would doubtless have eventually been brought to the Muslim understanding of God and his law. The fundamental assumptions that governed Latin Christendom would thereby have been radically and momentously transformed. Few, if any, who fought at Poitiers would have realised it, but at stake in the battle had been nothing less than the legacy of Saint Paul.

Gregory, when he sent his mission to Kent, had been motivated in part by his awareness that Britain had once been an imperial province. The paganism of its new rulers had offended him not merely as a Christian, but as a Roman. To Angles and Saxons, however, such considerations meant nothing. Grateful though they were to Gregory for his role in bringing them to Christ, their loyalty to the papacy implied no devotion to any long-vanished Roman imperial order. For Anglo-Saxon monks, the pagan darkness that loured over the eastern reaches of Germany, from the North Sea coast to the great forests of the interior, spoke not of an invincible savagery, not of a barbarism best left alone, but of a pressing need for light. All the world was theirs to illumine with the blaze of Christ. It was not the inheritance of Roman imperialism that inspired them, but the example of Patrick and Columbanus.

The rhythms of life and death, and of the cycle of the year, proved no less adaptable to the purposes of the Anglo-Saxon Church. So it was that hel, the pagan underworld, where all the dead were believed to dwell, became, in the writings of monks, the abode of the damned; and so it was too that Eostre, the festival of the spring, which Bede had speculated might derive from a goddess, gave its name to the holiest Christian feast-day of all. Hell and Easter: the garbing of the Church’s teachings in Anglo-Saxon robes did not signal a surrender to the pagan past, but rather its rout. Only because the gods had been toppled from their thrones, melted utterly by the light of Christ, or else banished to where monsters stalked, in fens or on lonely hills, could their allure safely be put to Christian ends. The victory of the new was adorned with the trophies of the old.

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.

The bare stump of the oak served as a proof of what the missionary had been claiming. Christ had triumphed over Thunor. Pilgrims still travelled to Geisner; but now, when they did so, it was to worship in an oratory made from freshly sawn oaken planks.

Boniface had not been so naïve as to think that his mission was thereby done. The task of winning people for Christ could not be achieved merely by cutting down a tree. Converts, even after baptism, continued to practise any number of pestiferous customs: offering sacrifice to springs, inspecting entrails, claiming to read the future. Such back-sliding was not the worst. Travelling through the lands east of the Rhine that lay under the rule of the Franks – Hesse, and Thuringia, and Swabia – Boniface had been horrified by what he found. Churches that in many cases reached back centuries seemed rotten with pagan practices. Merchants who sold slaves to the Saxons for sacrifice; noblemen who hid their worship of idols ‘under the cloak of Christianity’;6 priests who made sacrifice of goats and bulls; bishops who fornicated, and inherited their sees from their fathers, and indulged in spectacular blood-feuds: these were not the kinds of Christian that Boniface was content to leave to their own devices. Rather than venture further into the forests of Saxony, as he had long dreamed of doing, he had embarked instead on a great labour of reform.

In 776, Charlemagne imposed a treaty on the Saxons that obliged them to accept baptism. 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. There would be no stitching it back together. Instead, dyed in gore, its ragged tatters were to lie for ever in the mud. As a programme for bringing an entire pagan people to Christ, it was savage as none had ever been before. A bloody and imperious precedent had been set.

But was it Christian? Forcing pagans to convert at sword-point was hardly the cause for which Boniface had died, after all. Perhaps it was telling, then, that the most pointed criticism of the policy should have come from a compatriot of the sainted martyr. ‘Faith arises from the will, not from compulsion.’11 So wrote Alcuin, a brilliant scholar from Northumbria who in 781 had met Charlemagne while returning from a visit to Rome, and been recruited to his court. Pagans, he urged the king, should be persuaded, not forced to convert. ‘Let peoples newly brought to Christ be nourished in a mild manner, as infants are given milk – for instruct them brutally, and the risk then, their minds being weak, is that they will vomit everything up.’

Yet this imposed on Charlemagne a ferocious obligation: for how could God’s law possibly be written on the hearts of the Christian people if they were not properly Christian? Without education, they were doomed; without education, they could not be brought to Christ. Correctio, Charlemagne termed his mission: the schooling of his subjects in the authentic knowledge of God. ‘May those who copy the pronouncements of the holy law and the hallowed sayings of the fathers sit here.’15 Such was the prayer that Alcuin, following his appointment as abbot of Tours in 797, ordered to be inscribed over the room where monks would toil daily at their great task of writing. Under his leadership, the monastery became a powerhouse of penmanship. Its particular focus was the production of single-volume collections of scripture. Edited by Alcuin himself, these were written to be as user-friendly as possible. No longer did words run into one another. Capital letters were deployed to signal the start of new sentences. For the first time, a single stroke like a lightning-flash was introduced to indicate doubt: the question mark. Each compendium of scripture, so one monk declared, was ‘a library beyond compare’.16 In ancient Alexandria, it had been called ta biblia ta hagia, ‘the holy books’ – and in time, so as to emphasise the unique holiness of what they were producing, monks in Francia would transliterate the Greek word biblia into Latin. The Old and New Testaments would come to be known sim...

Increasingly, in the depths of the Frankish countryside, there was no aspect of existence that Christian teaching did not touch. Whether drawing up a charter, or tending a sick cow, or advising on where best to dig a well, rare was the priest who did not serve his flock as the ultimate fount of knowledge. The rhythms of the Lord’s Prayer and the Creed, repeated daily across the Frankish empire and beyond, in the kingdoms of Britain, and Ireland, and Spain, spoke of a Christian people becoming ever more Christian. The turning of the year, the tilling, the sowing, the reaping, and the passage of human life, from birth to death – all now lay in the charge of Christ.

This time, the Hungarians had come to conquer. Early in August, they arrived before the walls of Augsburg. The city, rich and strategically vital though it was, stood perilously exposed. In the hour of its darkest peril, it was Ulrich, the city’s aged and formidably learned bishop, who took command of its defence. While men laboured to shore up the walls, and women walked in procession, raising fearful prayers, the old scholar toured the battlements, inspiring the garrison to trust in Christ. Yet so overwhelming were the forces besieging the city, and so menacing their preparations, that it seemed to many that Augsburg was bound to fall. On 8 August, as the siege engines crawled towards the fortifications, and infantry were driven forwards under the lash, a gateway above the river Lech was breached. Ulrich, ‘wearing only his vestments, protected by neither shield, nor chain mail, nor helmet’,22 rode out to block the Hungarians’ path. Miraculously, despite the hissing of arrows all around him, and the thudding of stones, he succeeded in holding the attackers at bay. The open gate was secured. The Hungarians did not enter the city.

From Scandinavia to central Europe, pagan warlords began to contemplate the same possibility: that the surest path to profiting from the Christian world might not be to tear it to pieces, but rather to be woven into its fabric. Sure enough, two decades after the great slaughter of his people beside the Lech, Géza, the king of the Hungarians, became a Christian. Reproached by a monk for continuing to offer sacrifice ‘to various false gods’, he cheerily acknowledged that hedging his bets ‘had brought him both wealth and great power’.

This spasm of mob violence – although obviously an embarrassment to Gerard – was not without salutary effect. There was precedent for putting heretics to death. Half a century earlier, the clerics of Orléans charged with scoffing at the existence of the Church had been publicly burned: the first people to be executed for heresy in the entire history of the Latin West.

‘The Pope,’ Gregory VII had affirmed, ‘may be judged by no one.’24 All Christian people, even kings, even emperors, were subject to his rulings. The Curia provided Christendom with its final court of appeal. A supreme paradox: that the Church, by rending itself free of the secular, had itself become a state.

Here, for Gratian, was the foundation-stone of justice. So important to him was the command that he opened the Decretum by citing it. Echoing the Stoics much as Paul had done, he opted to define it as natural law – and the key to fashioning a properly Christian legal system. All souls were equal in the eyes of God. Only if it were founded on this assumption could justice truly be done. Anything obstructing it had to go. ‘Enactments, whether ecclesiastical or secular, if they are proved to be contrary to natural law, must be totally excluded.’28 Much flowed from this formulation that earlier ages would have struggled to comprehend. Age-old presumptions were being decisively overturned: that custom was the ultimate authority; that the great were owed a different justice from the humble; that inequality was something natural, to be taken for granted.

Gratian, by providing them with both a criterion and a sanction for weeding out objectionable customs, had transfigured the very understanding of law. No longer did it exist to uphold the differences in status that Roman jurists and Frankish kings alike had always taken for granted. Instead, its purpose was to provide equal justice to every individual, regardless of rank, or wealth, or lineage – for every individual was equally a child of God.

Now, in 1231, there came a fresh refinement. A new pope, Gregory IX, authorised Conrad not merely to preach against heresy, but to devote himself to the search for it – the inquisitio. No longer was it the responsibility of a bishop to bring heretics to trial, and sit in judgement on them, but rather that of a cleric especially appointed to the task.

crozada, they called the campaign: a ‘crusade’. Yet although the word would in time be applied retrospectively to the great expedition that had been launched by Urban, the crusade against the Albigensians was war of a kind that Christians had never fought before. It was not, as Charlemagne’s campaigns against the Saxons had been, an exercise in territorial expansion; nor was it, in the manner of the crusades that aimed at the liberation of Jerusalem, an armed pilgrimage to a destination of transcendent holiness. Rather, it had as its goal the extirpation of dangerous beliefs. Only blood could wash Christendom clean of the pollution presented to the Christian people by heresy. Storming Béziers, there were some who worried how the faithful were to be distinguished from heretics. ‘Lord,’ they asked the papal legate, ‘what shall we do?’ ‘Kill them all,’ came the blunt reply. ‘God knows his own.’

Thomas Aquinas himself died thinking that he had failed in his efforts, and that, before the radiant unknowability of God, everything he had written was the merest chaff; in Paris, two years after his death, various of his propositions were condemned by the city’s bishop. It did not take long, though, for the sheer scale of his achievement to be recognised and gratefully acknowledged. 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.

Aristotle was not the only philosopher cited by Aquinas in his great work. There were other pagans too; there were even Saracens and Jews. His readiness to acknowledge them as authorities was a sign, not of any cultural cringe, but of the opposite: an absolute confidence that wisdom was Christian, no matter where it might be found.

In 1519, more than a decade after Columbus’ death, a Spanish adventurer named Hernán Cortés disembarked with five hundred men on the shore of an immense landmass that was already coming to be called America. Informed that there lay inland the capital of a great empire, Cortés took the staggeringly bold decision to head for it. He and his men were stupefied by what they found: a fantastical vision of lakes and towering temples, radiating ‘flashes of light like quetzal plumes’,14 immensely vaster than any city in Spain. Canals bustled with canoes; flowers hung over the waterways. Tenochtitlan, wealthy and beautiful, was a monument to the formidable prowess of the conquerors who had built it: the Mexica. It was also a monument to something much more: their understanding of time itself. The city, only recently built, existed in the shadow of other, earlier cities, once no less magnificent, but long since abandoned. The emperor of the Mexica, going on foot, would often make pilgrimage to one of these massive ruins. No more awesome warning could have been served him that the world was endlessly mutable, governed by cycles of greatness and collapse, than to visit the wreckage of such a city. The anxiety of the Mexica that their own power might crumble shaded readily into an even profounder dread: that the world itself might darken and turn to dust. So it was, across Tenochtitlan, that they had raised immense pyramids; on the summit of these, at times of particular peril, when the...