Something Old

Not everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, we recommend "something old" that is still well worth reading. "Something Old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique classic to a good book first published four or more years ago.      

 “DOMINION – The Making of the Western Mind” by Tom Holland (first published 2019)

 

In reviewing Tom Holland’s Dominion – The Making of the Western Mind I am breaking my own code. This “Something Old” section of my blog is supposed to concern itself with books first published four or more years ago, and here I am reviewing a book first published a mere three years ago. Oh well!

 

Tom Holland’s long and compendious book has received much attention and – given that it has a very Christian message -  has gained praise from many unexpected quarters. Be it noted that, while first released as Dominion – The Making of the Western Mind, it was also published under the title Dominion – How the Christian Revolution Remade the World.

 

Holland’s central thesis is essentially a very simple one – the Western mind (meaning the mind of people living in Europe and in countries that have been influenced by Europe, or dominantly settled by Europeans) has been largely shaped by Christian thought. For most of approximately 1700 years – since Constantine legalised Christianity in the Roman Empire – the Christian faith dominated Europe, and despite all the persecutions, wars of religion, pogroms and other gross injustices that were perpetrated in Europe when it became known as Christendom, the essential teachings of the New Testament still endured and guided thinkers and philosophers. This was true even of those who were at odds with the ecclesiastical order. Indeed many who attacked the church were acting on Christian precepts. Until very, very recently, few people would have disputed this claim. Christianity made Europe what it is. But in an age of “secularism” (a very ambiguous word), it is often claimed that Christianity is so much in decline that it no longer influences the way Westerners think. And this is what Holland refutes. As he interprets it, underlying even movements that regard themselves as secular, agnostic or even atheist, there is still a large residue of Christian thought, assumptions and attitudes. In many respects, those in the West who decry or belittle Christianity are still acting on precepts which grew out of Christianity.

To orient you, let me explain that Tom Holland divides his lengthy treatise in three.

Part One he calls “Antiquity” taking us through pre-Christian Athens and Jerusalem, the origins of Christianity and its spread (with an emphasis on Saint Paul), the establishment of an orthodox creed, how heaven was conceived, how far early Christian missionaries went, the doctrine of charity and then, in the early 7^th century, the barrier that was raised with the advent of Islam. I confess that I found this part – the first 180 pages of Dominion – to be the hardest to read, not because it was difficult to read, but [I beg your pardon for saying so] because it was all familiar to me from my own time taking a degree in, and then lecturing in, early Christian history. So we are taken through the development of a monotheistic belief among Athenian philosophers and the gradual development of God among the Jews. The Jewish religion was the first to favour the poor as opposed to the powerful. With Christianity there came a proclamation in universal terms of favour of the poor and weak over the rich and powerful. It is in the hard development of Christian orthodoxy that one has to wrestle with thinkers like Origen and Arius and the extremely puritan Donatists before we reach the Nicene Creed. There is the matter of charity, and the conflict between Pelagius who says human beings are perfectible by their own will; and Augustine who says human beings are inherently flawed. There is the influence of Manicheanism  with its dualistic ideas. Holland also notes the primal split in early Christianity between those who see faith having to work in the world and those who believe faith can be practised only by withdrawing from this world – the hermit or monastical impulse that will appear again and again in Christian history. “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.” (Chapter 4)

 But in all this, Holland emphasises the universality of Christianity’s claims and the message that all human beings are equal – breaking with Classical pre-Christian societies

Part Two Holland calls “Christendom” from the early Middle Ages on, when the Christian faith dominated Europe, with missionaries like Boniface converting the pagan Saxons, but with the threat of an expanding Islam conquering Iberia and leading to the long Reconquista. And it is while examining the Middle Ages that Holland makes it clear there have been many “Reformations” in Christian history, for the church always has to be reformed. One of the most important was when Pope Gregory VII introduced a reformation as he faced off against the Emperor (heir to Charlemagne) and established an essential separation of church from state by making the appointment of priests and bishops the province of the church alone. In an age when the first universities were developing from church schools, it began to be more fully understood that faith could be harnessed with reason. (Peter Abelard is referenced.)There was also the codification of church law which, though often reviled in much later centuries by those opposing church and faith, still became the template for later legal codes. Aquinas was one of the leading lights in this. But, as Holland interprets it, the more the faith was codified, the more people were excluded for their heterodoxy. And this meant the beginning of persecutions and the licensing of the first inquisitors. Holland discusses the persecution and ghetto-isation of Jews and the crushing of the Cathars or Albigensians.

But there is an up-side to Medieval Christianity, both before and after the split between the Catholic West (Rome) and the Orthodox East (Constantinople). Although recent authors often emphasise the limited status of women in the Western Middle Ages, Holland reminds us that the sexual mores of pre-Christian Rome offered very little status for women: “A sexual order rooted in the assumption that any man in a position of power had the right to exploit his inferiors, to use the orifices of a slave or a prostitute to relieve his needs much as he might use a urinal, had been ended. Paul’s insistence that the body of every human being was a holy vessel had triumphed. Instincts taken for granted by the Romans had been recast as sin.” (Chapter 11; Page 263) Holland correctly notes that the church’s insistence on monogamous marriage actually raised the status of women in that the husband was called to be faithful. Also marriage was no longer seen as an alliance between families but as a matter of free choice … not that (in the dynastic and familial marriages that still took place) this precept was always honoured… and of course the down-side was that “aberrant” people, such as homosexuals, were severely punished. There was a war on sodomy.

An apocalyptic sub-culture in Christianity meant there were always those who believed their actions could trigger the second coming of Christ. Such apocalyptic upheavals happened at the time when the Catholic church was at a low ebb, its authority compromised by the split between a pope in Rome and an anti-pope in Avignon. In this time, Jan Hus in Bohemia was really the first “protestant” in anything like the current meaning of the word, rebelling against the Catholic church and gaining a large following for his reformation. But such radical changes always bring out extremists; and Holland speaks of the Taborists, also in Bohemia, who believed Christ was coming and who waged war against both Hus’s followers and Catholics. There was much bloodshed before they were defeated. In a way, this was a forerunner of what happened (with the wars of religion that followed) when Martin Luther inaugurated what is usually regarded as the beginning of the Protestant Reformation. Holland see Luther’s reformation as a necessary part of the Christian tradition – like Pope Gregory VII’s reformation centuries earlier. But he is aware that Protestantism tended to be fissiparous, rapidly splitting into separate and sometimes mutually-hostile churches (Calvinist, Lutheran, Anglican etc.). And again there were extremists, hated by both Catholic and Protestants, like the violent Anabaptists who again had apocalyptic beliefs and who again were expunged in bloodshed.

In his presentation of Luther (in Chapter 13), Holland tends to go easy on him, under-stating his violence in encouraging war against rebellious peasants ; but in Chapter 15, he at least notes that Luther’s antisemitism was even more extreme than the medieval antisemitism that had preceded it. Also, despite his largely Anglican orientation, Holland is very even-handed in presenting Catholicism  and Protestantism (the Eastern Orthodox churches have lesser space in this book). Spanish conquistadores took over most of South and Central America, often enslaving the peoples they conquered; but many Catholic authorities protested about this and the cardinal Bartolome de las Casas wrote one of the earliest condemnations of slavery. Galileo (whom Holland does not depict in a particularly favourable light) was condemned to house arrest for his novel cosmology; but the Jesuits were very advanced in the astronomy they taught and brought to China. As Holland puts it “Natural history had revealed itself to be nothing if not Christian through and through” (Chapter 14, page 343) And the Jesuit Matteo Ricci, also in China, was one of the first to pioneer “inculturation” – that is, teaching Christianity in ways comprehensible to a specific society.

So we come to Part Three, “Modernitas”, being basically the last three centuries, and it is here that Holland is most insistent in his basic theses – first, that there are repeated patterns in Christian history; but second, and far more important, that Christian precepts still underpin Western civilisation, even if they are not always recognised.

The Puritans of England, and of their colonies in what later became the United States of America, were very much like the Donatists of many centuries earlier, who insisted on strict, unerring righteousness, often not making allowances for common human weaknesses.

But, says Holland, many Puritans connected reason to the light of God and as such, opened the way for more free thought and emphasis on personal conscience. Thus, says Holland, in the beginning of the so-called “Age of Enlightenment”, many who now protested against organised religion were actually following a Christian tradition. The Jewish philosopher Baruch Spinoza had been expelled from the synagogue for his heterodox thought about God. Holland says his ideas were very much influenced by Quakers and other current Protestant thinkers. Holland even manages to present the sceptical anti-clerical Voltaire as a Christian malgre lui because, like Christians, he sought a universal, rational faith. He scores a palpable hit when he discusses the leaders of the French Revolution and their heirs who, scorning the centuries of Christian “superstition”, claimed to adopt the Classical antiquity of Greece and Rome as their models while devising their Declaration of the Rights of Man – a plan for universal human rights. It took a very questionable character – the Marquis de Sade – to point out correctly that those hallowed ancient Classical societies were slave states with absolutely no conception of human rights, no sense of the equality of social classes and a strong preference for the rich and powerful over the poor and weak. The Marquis de Sade himself delighted in the thought of wanton power over the powerless, but he was admitting that the notion of universal human rights emerged from those superstitious weakling Christians. Even more embarrassing, unacknowledged, the framing of a legal system by the revolutionaries leaned heavily on despised Catholic canon law.

Holland notes, correctly, that Christian concern was involved in such things as the ending of suttee in India, the end of the Atlantic slave trade and diplomacy to encourage Muslim states from slaving.

By the early 19^th century, many anti-Christians in Europe were embracing “secularism” (laicite if you are French). But Holland notes: “The great claim of what, in 1846, an English newspaper editor first terms ‘secularism’ was to neutrality. Yet this was a conceit. Secularism was not a neutral concept. The very word came trailing incense clouds of meaning that were irrevocably and venerably Christian. That there existed two dimensions, the secular and the religious, was an assumption that reached back centuries beyond the [Protestant] Reformation: to [Pope] Gregory the VII, and to Columbanus, and to Augustine. The concept of secularism – for all that it was promoted by the editor who invented the word as an antidote to religion – testified not to Christianity’s decline, but to its infinite capacity for evolution.” (Chapter 17, Page 411)

Speaking of another form of evolution, Holland notes (correctly) that Darwin’s thesis of natural selection was not wholly opposed by Christians, but did cause Christians to question what the moral and ethical results of Darwinism would be: “Nervousness at the idea that humanity might have evolved from another species was not bred merely of a snobbery towards monkeys. Something much more was at stake. To believe that God had become man and suffered the death of a slave was to believe that there might be strength in weakness, and victory in defeat. Darwin’s theory, more radically than anything that previously had emerged from Christian civilisation, challenged that assumption. Weakness was nothing to be valued. Jesus, by commending the weak and the poor over those better suited to the great struggle for survival that was existence, had set Homo sapiens upon the downward path towards degeneration.” (Chapter 18, Page 425)

This, says Holland, was very much the thesis of Friedrich Nietzsche in his hatred for Christianity: “Concern for the lowly and the suffering, far from serving the cause of justice, was a form of poison. Nietzsche, more radically than many a theologian, had penetrated to the heart  of everything that was most shocking about the Christian faith. ‘To devise something which could even approach the seductive, intoxicating, anaesthetising, and corrupting of the symbol of the ‘holy cross’, that horrific paradox of the ‘crucified God’, that mystery of an inconceivably ultimate, most extreme cruelty and self-crucifixion undertaken for the salvation of mankind! ” Like Paul, Nietzsche knew it was a scandal. Unlike Paul, he found it repellent. The spectacle of Christ being tortured to death had been bait for the powerful. It had persuaded them – the strong and the healthy, the beautiful and the brave, the powerful and the self-assured – that it was their natural inferiors, the hungry and the humble, who deserved to inherit the earth. … Christianity, by taking the side of everything ill-constituted, and weak, and feeble, had made all humanity sick… The weak had conquered the strong; the slaves had vanquished their masters…” (Chapter 19, pp.448-449)

In effect, in Europe concern for the welfare of the poor, the sick, the weak and the mentally feeble was born of the Christian concepts of universal humanity, of a God who favoured the poor, not the powerful. There would be no universal charter of human rights without this underpinning. It was no accident that, whether intended by Darwin or not, the new science did lead to eugenics – mainstream among biologists in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries – and ramped up racism in its rigorous categorising of human groups as inferior and superior. Raw power and brute force were virtues in rising totalitarian states. 

Yet says Tom Holland, the Bolshevik desire to make heaven-on-earth in one fell swoop, whether Lenin and his cohorts realised it or not, was actually rooted in failed Christian-inspired apocalyptic movements. The desire for all things to be held in common could be found in the Acts of the Apostles and other seminal Christian texts. Of Lenin’s programme, Holland writes: “Communists who insisted, in opposition to Lenin, on working alongside liberals, on confessing qualms about violence, on worrying that Lenin’s ambitions for a tightly organised, strictly disciplined party threatened dictatorship, were not truly communists at all – just a sect. Sternly, like the Donatists, the Bolsheviks dismissed any suggestion of compromising with the world as it was. Eagerly, like the Taborites, they yearned to see the apocalypse arrive, to see paradise established on earth. Fiercely, like the Diggers [radicals in 17^th century England], they dreamed of an order in which land once held by aristocrats and kings would become the property of the people, a common treasury. Lenin, who was reputed to admire both the Anabaptists of Munster and Oliver Cromwell, was not entirely contemptuous of the past. Proof of what was to come were plentiful there. History, like an arrow, was proceeding on its implacable course. Capitalism was destined to collapse, and the paradise lost by humanity at the beginning of time to be restored. Those who doubted it had only to read the teachings and prophecies of their great teacher to be reassured. The hour of salvation lay that hand.” (Chapter 18, page 442) There was some Christian inspiration in the foundation of the officially atheist Soviet state.

There was much paradox in the Christianity of the 19^th and 20^th centuries – the religion was brought to Africa and other non-European countries, by colonialists, many of whom were interested in exploitation and power. Yet the message of Christianity was a universal one, not a perpetuation of one ethnic or racial culture. It was Nelson Mandela, a month before he was inaugurated as president, who celebrated Easter by saying “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.” (Chapter 20, page 488) It was assumed by many non-Christian Europeans that when colonial powers left Africa, Christianity in Africa would collapse because, they assumed, it had flourished only because Africans wanted to associate with those colonial Europeans who were in power. In fact the opposite happened. In Africa, Christianity boomed once the colonial powers had gone – often distinctly African forms of Christianity – as it is a universal religion that does not favour particular tribes or tribal gods. A further paradox was that there are now far more practising Christians in Africa than there are in Europe.

As you will have seen in this summary of Dominion, it is a long and detailed book (to be precise 525 pages of text, before about 70 pages of references, bibliography and index, in the paperback edition I’ve been reading).  But I always give a warning about books that cover so much ground – over 2,000 years of it in this case. They tend to simplify or get some details wrong, perhaps missing nuances that specialists would notice. (See on this blog reviews of, for example, Jerusalem the Biography  and Voltaire’s Bastards ). To give some examples – none of which damages Holland’s overall thesis. He tells us that Cathars / Albigensians were simply practising a primitive form of Christianity. I’m pretty sure that many scholars would still see the Albigensians as a dualistic movement, quite a distance from orthodox Christianity – which of course does not justify their being persecuted. He treats extraordinarily briefly such matters as the Crusades and their impact. When he talks about the coming of Christianity to Anglo-Saxons, he focuses on Theodore, the second Archbishop of Canterbury rather than Augustine, the First Archbishop of Canterbury. (In fact Augustine of Canterbury gets no mention.) Also, he credits Puritans, Quakers and Baruch Spinoza with connecting reason to the light of God and as such, opening the way for more free thought and emphasis on personal conscience. But surely the most influential proponent of these concepts in the 17^th century was the French philosopher Rene Descartes with his (religiously inspired) rationalism. Descartes gets no mention… but I guess no book can mention everything.

Rounding off his thesis in his last chapter, Tom Holland claims to see distinct a Christian heritage in the current compassion for refuges and also in the Me Too movement of women (especially in the USA) who are repelled by the assumption that males should use them as playthings or chattels, violating their bodies against their will. In effect, he suggests, that after decades in which hedonism was promoted, there is now a backlash as there was when Christians in pagan Roman and post-Roman times denounced the abuse of the body.

Says Holland “Christianity, it seemed, had no need of Christians for its assumptions still to flourish. Whether this was an illusion, or whether the power held by victims over victimisers would survive the myth that had given it birth, only time would tell. As it was, the retreat of Christian belief did not seem to imply any necessary retreat of Christian values. Quite the contrary. Even in Europe – a continent with churches far emptier than those of the United States – the trace elements of Christianity continued to infuse people’s morals and presumptions so utterly that many failed to detect their presence.  Like dust particles so fine as to be invisible to the naked eye, they were breathed in equally by everyone: believers, atheists, and those who never paused so much as to think about religion.” (Chapter 21, page 517)

I think it is irrefutable that Christianity informed the nature of Western civilization more than any other movement. But in these last words, I regret to say, we find Tom Holland’s Achilles heel. Let’s put aside the fact that there are still millions of Europeans for whom Christianity is an important and living thing. Surely those, perhaps the majority, for whom Christianity is now merely “dust particles so fine as to be invisible to the naked eye” are informed by Christianity less than they are by other belief-systems – political parties, consumerism, hedonism, activism in many causes etc. etc. And if that is the case they are not Christians. There’s a little bit of whistling in the dark to find dim traces of Christianity in them.