Dominion

Everybody seems to be reading Dominion, the latest offering from popular historian Tom Holland.  Everybody has the right idea; this is an excellent book.  If you're not already familiar with Holland, he is a) not Spiderman and b) a writer of gripping narrative history.  If you want to get a feel for the collapse of the Roman Republic, a sense of what it was like to live through, you can't do much better than his Rubicon.  If you want to become acquainted with the Caesars and their world, and if you can stand to wade through the inevitable smut which goes with that acquaintance, then Dynasty is fantastic.  And In the Shadow of the Sword tackles the origins of Islam in a way which is both fascinating and - in the way it challenges orthodoxy - brave.  He has also written other things; I have not yet read them.  So many books, so little time.

Dominion is something a bit different.  It is, if you like, a narrative history of the whole of Western culture, in particular of Western Christendom.  How on earth would you write something like that - and keep it to a size which the average mortal would be willing to read?  Holland does it through snippets, visiting a particular incident and exploring its significance before jumping sometimes hundreds of years to the next episode, all grouped together into three broad eras: antiquity, Christendom, modernitas.  The impression is like a vast picture which has been sketched out, with only some details here and there painted on in full colour.  But those individual episodes are enough to give the shape of what is going on more generally on this vast canvas.  To mix metaphors, through these little tasters one gets the genuine flavour of the different moments, and anyway there would be far too much to digest if you ate everything on the table.

The overall picture, beginning in pre-Christian antiquity, is of a world turned upside down.  In a classical world in which power was everything, the news of the crucified God explodes like a bomb.  Values are decisively changed.  The weak are valued; status hierarchies are upended.  And in the ebb and flow of the centuries Holland shows how this revolutionary message lay behind so many of the cultural movements of the West: from the Christianisation of the Empire, right through to the building of new empires.  The revolution often ossifies - the Papacy under Gregory VII sets out to reform the world in the image of the Gospel, but the same institutions, now settled down and entrenched in power, in the next few centuries become the targets of reformers with the same aim.  The revolution creates tensions - it is Christianity which makes European powers feel superior and therefore entitled to enslave others, but it is Christianity which gives Europeans an uneasy conscience about this state of affairs and ultimately leads to abolition.  The revolution can be and has been misunderstood, misappropriated, misdirected.  But it has kept coming back.

Holland's main thesis is this: that we are so steeped in Christian values that we have forgotten they are not universal.  The modern humanist who asserts the worth and dignity of each individual thinks they are stating something self-evident - so did the French revolutionaries.  But in fact these claims have their roots in Christian teaching.  Even such anti-Christian movements as revolutionary Marxism make no sense apart from the revolution of the cross; why care for the poor and downtrodden at all?  The modern 'woke' scene springs from very Christian apprehensions.  The #MeToo movement only makes sense to us because of hundreds of years of sexual ethics which are rooted in the Christian message.

I find all this very persuasive.  One senses behind the narrative the influence of Charles Taylor - but to be honest, this is much more fun to read than Taylor's magnum opus.

Some quibbles - in a book of such vast scope, some detail necessarily gets left behind.  The treatment of the apostle Paul, and the tension between the law written on the heart and Torah, does not, to my mind, get to grips with the complexity of the issue - in particular, why does the apostle continually cite Torah if he is primarily (only?) interested in an internal law written by the Spirit?  I think that's important, because by the time we get to The Beatles we really do need to understand that 'all you need is love' means something very different on their lips than it does coming from, say, St Augustine - and the difference lies in the objective content which the law of love possesses for the apostolic writers and their descendants.  I'm not saying Holland doesn't see this difference - clearly he does - but that the particular contours need to be brought our more clearly.  But then, this is not a work of philosophy or theology, but history, and as such it really works.

Just a thought about what Christians should and shouldn't do with this book.  Firstly, what not to do: don't make out of the narrative a theology of glory.  'Aha!  Everything good in Western culture comes from Christianity!  Behold, the clear and straightforward link between Christian belief and goodness!'  That wouldn't do justice to the nuanced picture that Holland paints, in which Christian belief has often led to oppression and war; nor would it suit the gospel itself, which as Holland shows is about the triumph of weakness, a victory through obscurity and suffering, not through just being the best.  Then again, we also need to avoid overstating the conclusion.  Holland does argue that many contemporary movements only make sense because of our Christian past; it would be incorrect to infer that they are therefore Christian.  We cannot, in a straightforward way, claim #MeToo or Extinction Rebellion or whatever as Christian movements.

The use we should make of this work is much more limited.  It is helpful to be able to show that the values which many of us take for granted are not, in fact, universally obvious.  The world order which has been shaped by the influence of the West bears the hallmarks of the Christian past.  As Holland argues, even the universal claims of these value systems derive from the universal claims of the gospel.  Perhaps, then, those of us who are Christian apologists might be able to use this work to show that in fact the influence of Christian belief on the world has not been as negative as many of our contemporaries assume - precisely because many of the good things about Western culture which they and we take for granted actually stem from Christianity.

"All are heirs to the same revolution: a revolution which has, at its molten heart, the image of a god dead on a cross."