Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind

by Tom Holland

The triumph of the Church had been an abortion of everything that made for a humane and civilised society. Darkness had descended on Europe. For a millennium and more, popes and inquisitors had laboured to snuff out any spark of curiosity, or enquiry, or reason. The most notable martyr to this fanaticism had been Galileo. Tortured for demonstrating beyond all shadow of a doubt that the earth revolved around the sun, ‘he groaned away his days,’ as Voltaire had put it, ‘in the dungeons of the Inquisition’.27 Bishops who scoffed at Darwin’s theory of evolution by asking sneery questions about gorillas were merely the latest combatants in a war that was as old as Christianity itself. That nothing in this narrative was true did not prevent it from becoming a wildly popular myth. Nor was its appeal confined solely to agnostics. There was much in it for Protestants to relish as well. The portrayal of medieval Christendom as a hellhole of backwardness and bigotry reached all the way back to Luther.