The Economist UK - 31.08.2019

The EconomistAugust 31st 2019 Books & arts 73

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I

t was thewasps that bothered Darwin

most. Brought up as a Christian, he might

not have precisely subscribed to the gene-

sis offered by Genesis but—at first—he ac-

cepted the principle that God and his works

were good. Then came the Ichneumonidae.

Slender, almost sensual in shape, the

wasps seem a slight foe to stand against

2,000 years of theology. But for Darwin the

sting of these parasites, which grow by eat-

ing living caterpillars from within, was in-

tolerable: “I cannot persuade myself that a

beneficent & omnipotent God would have

designedly created [them].”

The wasps nibbled away Darwin’s be-

lief. Tom Holland’s belief in Darwin’s

Christianity has, however, remained

strong. In “Dominion”, he argues that many

of Darwin’s apparently atheistic traits,

from the fanaticism of his followers to his

scientific awe, “derived from a much older

seedbed”; ie, a Christian one. It is not just

Darwin. Look closely at the motifs of al-

most any modern movement, from the

communist hammer and sickle to the dic-

tums of Islamic State, and you can, Mr Hol-

land argues, discern the shadow of the

cross. In many ways “Christendom...re-

mains Christendom still.”

Proving this takes Mr Holland on a

sweeping narrative that runs from the fifth

centurybcvia Luther, Voltaire and the abo-

lition of slavery to #MeToo. The occasional

purple patch is forgivable, for he is an ex-

ceptionally good storyteller with a marvel-

lous eye for detail. He opens with an ac-

count of an ancient Persian torture in

which prisoners were eaten alive by mag-

gots. It is excellent fun.

Some of the most interesting sections

are from the early centuries when God had

not yet realised that He too was Christian.

Resolutely monotheistic, later Christians

would declare that their God was eternal

and omniscient. God, alas, seems not to

have known any of this. Bits of the Old Tes-

tament hint that, in its earliest stages, the

Jewish religion recognised many gods.

“Thou shalt have no other gods before me”

insists that rivals shall not be wor-

shipped—not that they don’t exist.

Then came the greatest revolution thus

far—the roads and reach of the Roman em-

pire. It was along these that St Paul trav-

elled, spreading the word of this now-

Christian God. Time, Mr Holland says, has

“dulled” people to the “utter strangeness”

of Paul’s message. Greco-Roman deities

had tended to favour acarpe diemapproach,

and to celebrate the proud. The new creed

celebrated the weak. The last were to be

first and the first last; suffering was ex-

tolled; living fully in the Promised Land

meant eschewing the pleasures of this one.

Yet this guarantor of deferred gratifica-

tion turned out to be better at promising

than following through. The Second Com-

ing never came and the Promised Land re-

mained elusive. Still, though the meek did

not inherit the Earth, they did acquire a

sense of God-given equality, while the

powerful, for their part, inherited a God-

given sense of unease. It is to these twin

impulses that Mr Holland ascribes many

social advances of recent centuries, from

the end of slavery tolgbtqrights.

He is right to stress Christianity’s influ-

ence. For more than a millennium the de-

bates and decisions of Europe were made

in Christ’s name. From the moment the

Venerable Bede inventedbcandaddates,

time itself turned on a Christian axis. But

Mr Holland makes a bolder claim. Like it or

not, he argues, Western values are “trace-

able back to Christian origins”.

Whether you agree may depend on

whether you want to. Mr Holland—whose

own faith faded when he was a teenager—is

a superb writer, but his theory has flaws.

For one, he uses the word “Christianity” as

though it is obvious what that means. It is

not. Christianity is a broad church and the

Bible is a big and incoherent book. It has

furnished verses to suit those who have

wanted to enslave Africans or emancipate

them, save infidels or slay them.

And merely to see the form of Christian-

ity in a movement is not to prove it is there.

Correlation is not causation. Some people,

after all, discern the shape of the Virgin

Mary in a piece of burned toast.^7

Religion and history

The cross’s shadow

Dominion.By Tom Holland. Basic Books;

624 pages; $18.99. Little, Brown; £20

Help thou mine unbelief

I

n a talkshe gave to the Royal Society of

Literature in 2010, Hilary Mantel offered

some advice to would-be authors of his-

torical fiction. “Learn to tolerate strange

world views,” she said:

Don’t pervert the values of the past. Women

in former eras were downtrodden and fre-

quently assented to it. Generally speaking,

our ancestors were not tolerant, liberal or

democratic...Can you live with that?

In his sixth novel, “To Calais, In Ordinary

Time”, James Meek seems to have taken Ms

Mantel’s interdiction as a challenge. This is

a book that seeks to compress the distance

between past and present, seeking out re-

flections of contemporary concerns in the

medieval world.

“To Calais...” is the story of three very

different protagonists, each setting out for

English-held Calais in the summer of 1348.

Will Quate, a farm boy from Outen Green (a

fictional Cotswold village), joins up with a

group of archers heading to fight in the

Hundred Years War. Lady Bernadine Cor-

bet, an aristocratic young woman, is be-

witched by “Le Roman de La Rose”, a courtly

poem, and fleeing a controlling father.

Thomas Pitkerro, a Scottish proctor, has

come to England from the papal court at

Avignon to carry out a survey of the abbey

at Malmesbury. The different plot lines

overlap and interweave as the three charac-

ters move haltingly to Calais, while, just

out of sight in France, lurks the greatest ca-

tastrophe ever to hit Western civilisation:

the Black Death.

Historical fiction

Road trip

To Calais, In Ordinary Time.By James

Meek.Canongate; 400 pages; £18.99