Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World

by Tom Holland

Luxury and splendour such as Rome could boast were dependent, in the final reckoning, on keeping those who sustained it in their place.

That such a god, of all gods, might have had a son, and that this son, suffering the fate of a slave, might have been tortured to death on a cross, were claims as stupefying as they were, to most Jews, repellent. No more shocking a reversal of their most devoutly held assumptions could possibly have been imagined. Not merely blasphemy, it was madness.

The relationship of Christianity to the world that gave birth to it is, then, paradoxical. The faith is at once the most enduring legacy of classical antiquity, and the index of its utter transformation. Formed of a great confluence of traditions—Persian and Jewish, Greek and Roman—it has long survived the collapse of the empire from which it first emerged, to become, in the words of one Jewish scholar, ‘the most powerful of hegemonic cultural systems in the history of the world’.

A Church that worshipped a God executed by heedless authorities presided over what has aptly been termed ‘a persecuting society’.*

Time itself has been Christianised.

The West, increasingly empty though the pews may be, remains firmly moored to its Christian past.

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.

This book explores what it was that made Christianity so subversive and disruptive; how completely it came to saturate the mindset of Latin Christendom; and why, in a West that is often doubtful of religion’s claims, so many of its instincts remain—for good and ill—thoroughly Christian.

Apollo might have favoured the Trojans, and Hera the Greeks, but no god had ever cared for a people with the jealous obsessiveness of the God of Israel.

Paul, at the heart of his gospel, was enshrining the Stoic concept of conscience.

Unlike the homelands of other peoples, that of the Christian people existed beyond the dimensions of altars, and hearth-fires, and fields. Indeed, without their belief in Christ as Lord, it would not have existed at all. It was Ignatius, a century before Origen, who had first given it the name that would endure forever after.34 Christianismos, he had called it: ‘Christianity’.

The fusion of theology with Roman bureaucracy at its most controlling resulted in an innovation never before attempted: a declaration of belief that proclaimed itself universal.

A 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.

Throughout Christian history, the yearning to reject a corrupt and contaminated world, to refuse any compromise with it, to aspire to a condition of untainted purity, would repeatedly manifest itself.

Fabulous stories were told of its reach: of how fire would turn back at his command; of how water fowl, if they offended him by gorging too greedily on fish, would be ordered to migrate, and do so.

That the soul was immortal; that it was incorporeal; that it was immaterial: all these were propositions that Augustine had derived not from scripture, but from Athens’ greatest philosopher. Plato’s influence on the Western Church had, in the long run, proven decisive.

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.

a peasant, only a hundred miles from Cambrai, had dreamed that a swarm of bees entered his anus, and revealed to him the iniquities of the clergy.

That Henry had soon reneged on his promises, capturing Rome in 1084 and forcing his great enemy to flee the city, had done nothing to lessen the impact of Gregory’s papacy on the mass of the Christian people.

Wait, what?

The dream of Gregory and his fellow reformers—of a Church rendered decisively distinct from the dimension of the earthly, from top to bottom, from palace to meanest village—no longer appeared a fantasy, but eminently realisable. A celibate clergy, once disentangled from the snares and meshes of the fallen world, would then be better fitted to serve the Christian people as a model of purity, and bring them to God.

In the various kingdoms, fiefdoms and cities that constituted the great patchwork of Christendom, something unprecedented had come into being: an entire class that owed its loyalty, not to local lords, but to a hierarchy that exulted in being ‘universal, and spread throughout the world’.23

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

The conviction Abelard had devoted his life to promoting—that God’s order was rational and governed by rules that mortals could aspire to comprehend—had become, less than a century after his death, an orthodoxy upheld by papal legates.

It was no offence against God, then, to argue, as Abelard did, ‘that the constitution or development of everything that originates without miracles can be adequately accounted for’.38 Quite the contrary. To identify the laws that governed the universe was to honour the Lord God who had formulated them. This conviction, far from perturbing the gatekeepers of the new universities, was precisely what animated them.

Mystery and reason: Christianity embraced them both.

‘The only men fit to preach are those who lack earthly riches, because—possessing nothing of their own—they hold everything in common.’

A momentous pattern was being set. Revolution had bred an elite—and this elite had bred demands for revolution.

‘A Jew, however poor, if he had ten sons would put them all to letters, not for gain, as the Christians do, but for the understanding of God’s law—and not only his sons, but his daughters.’

Women oozed; they bled; like bogs at their most treacherous, they were wet, and soft, and swallowed up men entire.

The virgin mother who had redeemed the fault of Eve, the mortal who had conceived within her uterus the timeless infinitude of the divine, Mary could embody for even the humblest and most unlettered peasant all the numerous paradoxes that lay at the heart of the Christian faith.

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.

‘I felt I was altogether born again and had entered paradise itself through open gates.’

In 1534, papal authority was formally repudiated by act of parliament. Henry was declared ‘the only supreme head on Earth of the Church of England’. Anyone who disputed his right to this title was guilty of capital treason.

If, as he insisted, he offered his followers a liberation from Christianity, then it was one that seemed eerily like a recalibration of it.

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.

No other conquerors, exporting an understanding of the divine peculiar to themselves, had so successfully persuaded peoples around the globe that it possessed a universal import.

‘Easter is a festival of human solidarity, because it celebrates the fulfilment of the Good News! The Good News borne by our risen Messiah who chose not one race, who chose not one country, who chose not one language, who chose not one tribe, who chose all of humankind!’

Secularism; liberal democracy; the concept of human rights: these were fit for the whole world to embrace. The inheritance of the Enlightenment was for everyone: a possession for all of mankind. It was promoted by the West, not because it was Western, but because it was universal.

To hail a religion for its compatibility with a secular society was decidedly not a neutral gesture. Secularism was no less bred of the sweep of Christian history than were Orbán’s barbed-wire fences.

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 human body was not an object, not a commodity to be used by the rich and powerful as and when they pleased. Two thousand years of Christian sexual morality had resulted in men as well as women widely taking this for granted. Had it not, then #MeToo would have had no force.

The measure of how Christian we as a society remain is that mass murder precipitated by racism tends to be seen as vastly more abhorrent than mass murder precipitated by an ambition to usher in a classless paradise.

Also helps that the Nazis kept scrupulous records of their genocide.