Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind by Tom Holland. Little Brown (London). 2019. Hbk. 594 pages. £25.
This is a big book with a big theme from an award winning writer of many popular big-themed books.
Subtitled The Making of the Western Mind, this follows other ambitious works by Tom Holland on the Persian Empire, triumph of Rome and Rise of Islam. Over three sections (Antiquity, Christendom, Modernitas ) the fluidly written text carries one along effortlessly without becoming stodgy or overly academic. We are treated to a roller-coaster ride full of interesting anecdotes and details that cover 25 centuries in 21 chapters of history – the extra 5 centuries come from considering the prequel in the biblical background and Classical Antiquity.
However, Holland does not intend his book to be just another history of Christianity but rather, as he writes, ‘to trace the currents of Christian influence that have spread most widely, and been most enduring into the present day’. In particular, how we have come to think in the way we do. This means acknowledging that we ‘live in a society still utterly saturated by Christian concepts and assumptions’ and that even our language comes ‘freighted with the legacy of Christendom’. Holland’s core thesis is that it is this legacy which makes the West so different from other cultures, particularly those of the pagan past.
Whilst all this is a commendable, I do have some reservations as to its execution. Each chapter is a catena of interesting stories that together tell the bigger story of how Christianity shaped the West: St Martin of Tours and the new radical attitudes to poverty and privilege; Augustine’s understanding of a secular space; Pope Gregory VII and the separation of state and church, etc.
But Holland’s race across the centuries inevitably entails a selectivity that is sometimes questionable.
Amazingly, there is no mention of St. Benedict, regarded as the ‘father of Western monasticism’, one of the most significant forces in shaping the West, and whilst there is extensive mention of the significance of Origen’s thinking, there is nothing on St Anthony or St Pachomious, who are even more significant in the history of the Orthodox church, but then this is not mentioned either.
Whilst this is disturbing, even more so at crucial junctions throughout is a lack of critical depth, that becomes misleading.
For example, pivotal to Holland’s narrative is the teaching of St Paul and the radical message of the letter to the Galatians with its affirmation of individual equivalence: that in Christ there is no more Jew and Greek, slave and free, male and female (Gal 3:28). Regardless of the fact that this is probably a pre-Pauline confessional statement, Holland shows no awareness that the Pauline corpus is a textual minefield and that not all the letters are authentic, nor even all parts of his letters free from later interpolations. As a result, their author can emerge as either ‘radical’, ‘liberal’, or ‘conservative’, depending which bits are being quoted, giving rise to inconsistent, even contradictory, teaching on crucial moral issues such as slavery, women and authority. There never was a single, unitary view of Christianity.
This is a complex subject that cannot easily be reduced to a simple storyline and has bedevilled discussion and ecclesial practice ever since – becoming particularly contentious in the Reformation. But instead of examining why this should be so or what exactly the original radical message of Paul might have been, we are presented with an imaginary figure struggling to reconcile apparently contradictory teachings. Nor is it clear how, as the story of Christianity unfolds, a message that began with such radicality would soon change from declaring solidarity across ethnicity, class divisions and gender difference of ‘No more Jew or Greek…..’ to simply no more Jews, women or challenging hierarchical status.
But perhaps the most surprising thing in all this vast story is the black hole that exists at its centre: apart from a few odd quotes, no real consideration is given to the actual founder of Christianity, of the Jewish prophet – the 'pale Galilean' – or what he may have taught. The Jesus of history has been completely subsumed into the Christ of a subsequent faith, the radical teaching of a 'kingdom' of humble service and humane inclusiveness eviscerated by the majesty of Christendom. Grand as is the story of Dominion, we are clearly not being told the whole story.