If I say to you, "Tom Holland", do you :
a) Assume I mean the big-shot Hollywood actor
b) Assume I mean the English historian
c) Wonder why the heck I'm spouting random names at you
If the answer is b), welcome to my world. What if I say, "Dominion" ? Do you :
a) Assume I mean the Dominion of Canada
b) Assume I mean the popular card game
c) Tell me to please stop with the delerious random statements already
The correct answer is c). Today's post is about the book Dominion by English historian Tom Holland. If you thought I was going to be describing a card game with a Hollywood star, I'm afraid you've come to the wrong blog.
Dominion is his latest offering. Unlike his previous efforts, which tell narrative history over relatively limited episodic moments, this is a sweeping epic on an altogether different scale. Holland charts how Christianity influenced, for better and for worse, the evolution of the Western and eventually global mindset. This is a mammoth task indeed, but Holland is more than capable of selecting appropriate moments to illustrate the wider trends. With consummate skill, he deftly renders an immense tale into something (relatively) concise, readable, and yet never lacking in the feeling of scope. It's particularly interesting to see how he uses his characteristic melodramatic style* to describe the present in the same way as the distant past, giving the whole work a palpable sense of continuity. This is enhanced further by keeping the focus on the mental world, rather than anything so mundane was what people actually did. Modern life is shown to be a contiguous development from a very ancient world, if hardly the same as it. Holland uses the what only ever to illustrate the more important why.
* This is intended as a complement. I like melodrama.
Holland's central thesis is simple but under-appreciated. Christianity, he says, has caused an extremely powerful shift in moral and philosophical attitudes, even among those who are virulently opposed to it. Secularism, he says, did not start because governments wanted the Church to keep its nose of our private business, but ironically for just the opposite : by demarking the limits of government (at the time monarchic government), the Church gave itself more control over its dominions*, not less. In order for the Church to administer the secular world, it was first necessary to define secularism itself.
* Still not referring to the board game, or Canada.
This separation of mental concepts is a running theme through the book, and Holland is particularly keen to illustrate how the Christian faith gave rise even to the very concept of religion. Prior to this idea that secular and theistic worlds are distinct, the world was seen with different eyes. It's not that faith didn't exist : it's that its intrusion into all aspects of life was taken for granted. Few, before Christianity, would have defined themselves by what supernatural deities they believed in. They believed in them, yes, but they didn't say that believing in Zeus was a core part of their identity any more than we might say that having electric light bulbs is part of ours.
There are strong echoes of Hannam's God's Philosophers here, sometimes very loudly. Whereas Hannam concentrated exclusively and explicitly on how Christianity (and especially Catholicism) influenced the material world view for the better, Holland is broader in scope and more implicit in his delivery. He is also not unbiased, concentrating heavily on the positive aspect, though not excluding the negative either.
What he is most successful at is demonstrating how powerful our underlying assumptions can be. To really step outside our most basic world view is no mean feat, and Holland makes an attempt as good as anyone could reasonably expect. As modernity turns ever more atheistic and anitheistic, Holland reminds us that the concept of human rights was developed through Christian morality. Indeed, he sees it as something that's hard to envisage developing otherwise, since the notion the universality of humanity, that we're all equal before God, was explicitly Christian and contrasted starkly with the prevailing ideas of the time (notably, he shows how it was likewise difficult even for the earliest Christians to escape the prevalent pagan moral views of their day).
Even many of the most vitriolic atheists today owe a moral debt to early Christian teachings, as though living in its moral afterlife. Few indeed would think that the poor deserved whatever suffering befell them, or that women are little more than things to service men. Holland shows how, while the notion of monogamous marriage may have eventually been perverted into something patriarchal, initially it was anything but. Far from binding unfortunate women to their oppressive husbands, the point was to end the abusive male freedom to copulate with anything in sight. By demanding fidelity from both partners, marriage began as an equaliser, not a tool of oppression.
But not all thinkers are wholly bound to such now-obvious notions of equality and freedom. Holland describes how Nietzsche's ideas hark back to a much earlier era, when people literally and sincerely believed that might equals right. Here we encounter the first and main weakness of the book. While Holland is keen to show that the concept Christian charity was, inasmuch as was possible in its time, an almost socialist revolution, the book almost entirely lacks any description of the debt Christianity owes to earlier thinkers - in particular the Greek philosophers.
For example, it seems very odd to describe how execution carried a stigma of shame and not describe the trial of Socrates, or not to acknowledge that the idea it's better to suffer an injustice than commit one originated with Plato. Many other early pagan philosophers came up with similarly daring ideas, and though Christianity may have been infinitely more successful at disseminating them, to not acknowledge their contribution is a strange omission. It seems highly unlikely that Christianity developed them entirely independently; its prehistory well deserves its own chapter. Holland shows very well how the conditions of the Roman Empire assisted the flourishing of the new religion, but says little enough about the initial origin of the ideas. Unbeliever though he is, is he still biased towards preserving a sense of mystery ? Possibly. Yet even if Christians genuinely came to their beliefs through divine revelation, one could still acknowledge their use of earlier authors to help them understand the word of God. Early Christian thinkers didn't put Aristotle back on the bookshelf.
The second mistake is also one of absence rather than inaccuracy. Holland dwells on the moral achievements of Christianity while somewhat neglecting its failings. It's not that he avoids them entirely - on occasion, he describes all too clearly some of the horrors that Christianity has inflicted - it's that such discussion is too much downplayed. Similarly, in some ways his largely implicit style of delivering a conclusion is often used to great effect, forcing the reader to formulate the conclusions for themselves - but at other times this becomes a weakness. Knowing what the author thinks, or even simply presenting any kind of interpretation at all, is sometimes essential for assessing one's own view, otherwise it becomes a series of events with little clear connection to link them. This is a rare problem in the book, but present nonetheless. Holland demonstrates very compellingly that Christianity led a moral revolution, and at times shows equally compellingly that many of its failings are secular in origin, not born of the faith itself. But failings it most certainly has, and the lack of discussion here becomes all too evident. I can understand why he would do this - the internet is chock-full of idiots who think all religion is the worst thing imaginable*, even as they themselves preach a distinctly Christian morality - but sometimes issues need to be dealt with head-on.
* He nicely notes the hypocrisy of John Lennon's Imagine, in which the singer prances around in his enormous mansion while saying we should have no possessions.
But in its main goals, Dominion is a resounding success. As he reaches his finale, his descriptions of Tolkein in the Somme find particular resonance. Soldiers immersed in unimaginable horrors have both clung more tightly to and discarded their faith and moral views; the complexity of psychology is very much in evidence. For the modern intelligentsia, God may be dead, but his shadow lingers. History, Holland shows, is indeed written and re-written by the victors, freely usurping the mantle of enemies where necessary and discrediting them where possible. Yet even the most perfect retcon has an inherent limit : for all that we can forget our past, we cannot escape it. Holland does a first-rate and much-need job of demonstrating how our most basic presumptions are far from the self-evident truths they are often held to be. 9/10 from me.
EDIT : A few months on, and I'm tempted to bump up the rating to 9.5. Holland describes how he used to feel the old Roman myths were so much more colourful and lively than the Christian stories, which I can certainly relate to. After letting the book sink in, I have to say that if his goal was to transform this particular part of a reader's worldview, for me it's a success. Even with such mundane things as playing Rome 2 Total War or re-watching The Vicar of Dibley, there's a different outlook on the events. The greatest story ever told ? I'd have said it was actually a pretty dull tale, not so long ago. Am I now converted ? Hell no, of course not, but I'd be a lot more inclined to agree that it does, at least, have fair claim to being an astonishingly revolutionary idea. Good job, Holland.
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