BOOKS & ARTS
BOOKS
The only route to the truth
As Christianity became more organised and hierarchical, it grew increasingly
hostile to both mysticism and empirical science, says Jonathan SumptionDominion: The Making
of the Western Mind
by Tom Holland
Little, Brown, £25, pp. 594Nobody can accuse Tom Holland of shying
away from big subjects. Dominion is noth-
ing less than a history of Christianity with
an underlying theme. The subtitle says it all.
It is dedicated to the idea that Christianity
has formed the western mind, not just in its
moral and intellectual conventions but in
their opposites, such as atheism or the natu-
ral sciences.
An argument so paradoxical provokes
thought, whether one agrees with it or not.
This one is sustained with all the breadth,
originality and erudition that we have come
to associate with Holland’s writing. The
technique is a sort of literary pointillism. An
incident, an image, an individual, a place are
presented as capturing the spirit of an epoch.
They coalesce to form a pattern which Hol-
land presents as revealing the contribution
of Christianity to the modern world.
Over the centuries, Christianity has
stood for many inconsistent things and
for many things which the ‘western mind’
has rejected. It has favoured both peace
and war, authority and anarchy, freedom
and despotism, individualism and collec-
tivism, often at the same time. It was for
centuries a consistent enemy of liberty of
conscience, scientific investigation, social
and gender equality and unconventional
sexuality. These things all reflect its funda-
mental conservatism, an inevitable feature of
a creed that has at its heart a historic revela-
tion of truth based on authority rather than
empirical enquiry. So the notion that it has
‘made’ the western mind calls for a rather
selective view of both Christianity and the
western mind.
What is the essence of Christianity?
How many of the beliefs that we associatewith it are really no more than the ephem-
eral social prejudices of people who hap-
pened to be Christians? Holland does
not in terms answer these questions. But
his answers are implicit in his narrative.
The essence of Christianity, he suggests, is
the nobility of suffering, the moral equal-
ity of human beings and the empire of love.
This is a defensible view, although hardly
a complete one. These three things have
indeed been among the basic aspirations of
Christianity. The problem is that Dominion
is a work of history, not moral theology. It is
not always easy to trace essential Christian
values through the alternating highs and
lows of Christian history.
Holland’s starting point is Christian-
ity’s conquest of the Roman world before
the conversion of Constantine, i.e. at a timewhen it did not have the support of govern-
ment or social convention, and was certain-
ly not the way to worldly fame or fortune.
This was when Christianity developed its
basic corpus of doctrine and moral pre-
cept. How was it able to sweep the civi-
lised world? The key figure is St Paul, the
Jew who transformed Christianity from
a Jewish sect to a universal faith, the teacher
and orator who skilfully adapted the mes-
sage to the audience wherever he went.
Of course, experience varied. But there
are three common and closely connect-
ed themes. In the first place, Christianity’s
emphasis on the moral equality of men was
fundamental. It offered an escape from the
mental and emotional constraints of an
intensely hierarchical society. This was par-
ticularly attractive to the humble, urban
groups from whom early Christian com-munities were mainly recruited. Secondly, it
promised personal salvation and eternal life
on conditions that were within every individ-
ual’s personal control. The hardships of the
world were the more bearable for being just
a phase of human existence. Thirdly, there
was a significant element of mysticism, at
a time when the worship of the man-gods of
the ancient world seemed emotionally unsat-
isfying to growing numbers of people. The
soil had been prepared by a variety of mysti-
cal sects, some home-grown, others adopted
from Indo-Iranian models such as Mithraism
and Zoroastrianism.
Yet many of the things which explained
the spread of Christianity in its first three
centuries were found to be extremely incon-
venient once it became an established reli-
gion. Christianity has always been a didactic
creed, claiming to be a collective embodi-
ment of truth. It could hardly have made so
many converts otherwise. But from the 4th
to the 18th century, it was also a creed of
government which both sustained authority
and was sustained by it. If this had not hap-
pened, it would probably not have survived.
It would have lost all coherence, disintegrat-
ing into a mass of warring sects, each with its
own beliefs, as it had already begun to do
in the 2nd and 3rd centuries. But the price
of coherence was high. Christianity was
transformed from a religion into something
more, namely a church characterised by
a high degree of organisation and consider-
able coercive power.
The promise of personal salvation was
still there. So too were the moral equality
of human beings and the message of love,
albeit in a rather attenuated form. But
Christianity acquired a hardening sense of
hierarchy, and a growing suspicion of alter-
native routes to truth which did not depend
on the mediation of an organised church.
Thus mysticism, which had been an impor-
tant element of early Christian practice, wasIt is not always easy to trace essential
Christian values through the alternating
highs and lows of Christian history