Tom Holland’s Dominion is a brilliant and fascinating tour de force of church history. His thesis is, that Christianity has so profoundly shaped Western thought, that even its opponents (of which there have been many) can’t escape its values - even when they attack it.
He argues that so comprehensively has Christianity seeped into the Western mind that even ‘Woke’ ideas are a result of it.. For example, #MeToo could only have happened in a society where there was a belief in (a) the equality of men and women and (b) the need for sexual continence – neither of which, have historically been regarded as ‘self-evident’ outwith Judeo-Christian theology.
Holland demonstrates how the very notion of ‘human rights’ found its origins in Christianity – ‘rights’ which have since become the global extension (albeit often unconsciously) of those Christian values.
However, whether ‘the fruit’ can last once ‘the root’ has
been rejected, is a question Holland leaves open (he confesses to having no
personal spiritual belief in his subject matter).
Sadly and inevitably, I would suggest, the evidence is that it
will not. The trends towards the commodification of human life (e.g. the
celebration, not even just the defence, of mass abortion and the demands for
legalised euthanasia), restrictions against free speech (cancel culture &
‘Hate Crime’ Bills), and the self-obsession with rights – all point to a
society increasingly detached from Christian roots and regressing into cold
utilitarianism.
The quotes below are just a few that struck a chord with me. They are, of course, self-selective and a partial rendering (they represent only a fraction of those I actually underlined). I’ve not, for example, included quotes highlighting the corruption and inconsistencies of the church throughout its long history. But as The Guardian's review noted: 'when we condemn the moral obscenities committed in the name of Christ, it is hard to do so without implicitly invoking his own teaching'.
As a Bible-believing Christian there are areas where, I think, Holland doesn't fully understand the nuances of the New Testament - but his big point is well made and hard to dispute.
So these are a few tasters – ultimately you should read the
book yourself to get the whole story.
[497BC] Physical perfection and moral superiority were
indissoluble: this was the assumption on the battlefield at Troy, only the base
were ugly. p14
‘The strong do what they have the power to do, and the weak
must suck it up’ p23
As on the battlefield of Troy, so in the new world order
forged by Rome - it was only by putting others in the shade that man most fully
became a man.
The future belonged to the strong. p28
Yet nothing was remotely as uncanny as the character of
Jesus himself. No one quite like him had ever been portrayed in literature. The
measure of this was that Christians, when they read the gospels, were able to
believe that the man whose life they depicted, a man who was described as
weeping, sweating, and bleeding, a man whose death they vividly and unsparingly
related, had indeed been what Paul proclaimed him to be: ‘the Son of God’. p86
…a momentous discovery was being put into effect: that to be
a victim might be a source of strength... and submission might be redefined as
triumph, degradation as glory, death as life. p92
That a slave, ‘a slight, frail, despised women’, might be
set among the elite of heaven, seated directly within the splendour of God’s
radiant palace, ahead of those who in the fallen world had been her
immeasurable superiors, was a potent illustration of the mystery that lay at
the heart of the Christian faith. p93
A concern for the downtrodden could not merely be summoned
into existence out of nothing. The logic that inspired two wealthy and educated
men such as Basil and Gregory to devote their lives to the poor derived from
the very fundamentals of their faith. p23
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 old
eccentric philosopher aside, few had ever queried this practise. Indeed, there
were cities who by ancient law had made a positive virtue out 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. p125
No longer did it [the Law] 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. p222
…every mortal - Christian or not - had rights that derived from God. Derechos humanos, las Casas had termed them: ‘human rights’. p331
Westphalia, a ‘Christian, general and permanent peace’ had
been brought to the blood-manured lands of the empire. The Princes who signed
it pledged themselves not to force their own religion on their subjects… Toleration
of religious difference had been enshrined as a Christian virtue. p353
‘God has made of one blood all nations’ when William Penn, writing
in prison, cited this line of scripture, he had been making precisely the same
case as las Casas; that all of humanity had been created equally in God's image;
that to argue for the hierarchy of races was an offence against the very
fundamentals of Christ’s teaching; that no peoples were fitted by the colour of
their skins to serve as either masters or slaves. p368
[Voltaire] The standards by which he judged Christianity, and condemned it for its faults, were not universal. They were not shared by philosophers across the world. they were not common from Beijing to Cayenne. They were distinctively, peculiarly Christian. p378
That all men had been created equal, and endowed with an inalienable
right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness were not remotely self-evident
truths. That most Americans believed they were owed less to philosophy than to
the Bible… The truest and ultimate seedbed of the American Republic - no matter
what some of those who had composed its founding documents might have cared to
think - was the book of Genesis. p384
[Sade] More clearly than many enthusiasts for enlightenment cared
to recognise, could see that the existence of human rights was no more provable
than the existence of God. p392
For eighteen long centuries the Christian conviction that
all human life was sacred had been underpinned by one doctrine more than any
other: that man and woman were created in God's image. The divine was to be
found as much in the pauper, the convict or the prostitute as it was in the
gentleman with his private income and book-lined study. p425
Carnegie, who had once been poor himself, had no time for
any idea that woe might be due the rich. Impatient with clergymen who offered
lectures from the pulpit on their iniquities, he held a sterner view of the
misery suffered by the poor, for he ‘had found the truth of evolution’. p436
[Nietzsche] No one, though - not Spinoza, not Darwin, not
Marx - had ever before dare to gaze
quite so unblinkingly at what the murder of its God might mean for a
civilization. ‘When one gives up the Christian faith, one pulls the right to
Christian morality out from under one’s feet.’ p448
Heinrich Himmler, the commander of the SS, plotted a 50 year programme that he trusted would see the religion utterly erased… ‘Harping on and on that God died on the cross out of pity for the weak, the sick, and the sinners, they then demand that the genetically diseased be kept alive in the name of a doctrine of pity that goes against nature, and of a misconceived notion of humanity’. p460
When Pius XII quoted Genesis to rebuke those who would
forget that humanity had a common origin, and all the peoples of the world had
a duty of charity to one another, the response from Nazi theorists was vituperative…
‘Can we still tolerate our children being obliged to learn that Jews and Negros,
just like Germans or Romans, are descended from Adam and Eve, simply because a
Jewish myth says so?’ p465
[Martin Luther] King, by stirring the slumbering conscience
of white Christians, succeeded in setting his country on a transformative new
path...
This was the same vision of progress that, in the 18th
century, had inspired Quakers and Evangelicals to campaign for the abolition of
slavery; but now, in the 1960s, the spark that had set it to flame with a
renewed brilliance was the faith of African Americans. The sound of protest was
the sound of the black churches. P475
The Beatles did not - as Martin Luther King had done - derive
their understanding of love as a force that animated the universe from a close
reading of scripture. Instead, they took it for granted. p477
The spectacle of Lennon imagining a world without
possessions while sitting in a huge mansion did nothing to put off his admirers. p480
Christianity, it seemed, had no need of actual Christians for its assumption still to flourish. Whether this was an illusion, or whether the power held by victims over their victimizers would survive the myth that had given it birth, only time would tell. p517
Holland T, Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind (Abacus, 2019).
