Dominion tells the epic story of how Western civilisation has been influenced by Christianity and how the Christian faith has had such an enduring impact and legacy. The author’s conviction is that this revolution which began 2,000 years ago in an obscure part of the world has proven to be transformative like nothing else in history.
This is a hefty read of well over 500 pages, completed by many more pages of endnotes, a well-stocked bibliography and a comprehensive index. It is primarily for those whose love of history spurs them to delve into the past to discover what it has to say about the present and the likely future.
Scandalous Beginnings
The book, subtitled ‘The Making of the Western Mind’, is in three roughly equal parts of seven chapters each: ‘Antiquity’, ‘Christendom’ and ‘Modernitas’. But before our journey begins the author opens with a significant preface, recounting the repellent, ghastly nature of crucifixion. This is a necessary introduction as Holland wants to ask how something as scandalous and grotesque as the execution of a ‘criminal’ in a long-vanished empire could come to exercise such a powerful and lasting impact on the world.
He attempts to answer this not by giving yet another history of Christianity but by seeking “to trace the currents of Christian influence that have spread most widely, and been the most enduring into the present day” (pxxiv). He asserts that to live in a Western country today is to belong to a society still utterly saturated by Christian concepts and assumptions. Even as pews empty, we are still connected to our Christian past. His book attempts to explore why this remains the case. How has the mindset of the West, often doubtful of its own convictions, remained so thoroughly Christian?
Holland asserts that to live in a Western country today is to belong to a society still utterly saturated by Christian concepts and assumptions.
Empires Won
Part One (‘Antiquity’) starts at 479 BC and concludes in the mid-8th Century AD. Significant features include the absorption of the Jewish people into the Roman Empire and Paul’s missionary activities, starting in Galatia. We then move rapidly through early Church history taking in figures such as Irenaeus, Marcion and Origen. The author comments that this was a time when the idea of the Roman empire itself becoming Christian was a fantastical possibility and “to believe that a Caesar might be won for Christ was to believe in miracles” (p108).
However, then came Constantine and the Council of Nicaea, setting a pattern that over the course of the following centuries would shape the contours of Western politics. Christianity may have become compromised and tainted, but at least it was no longer marginalised. Equally, Constantine had “imported directly into the heart of his empire a new, unpredictable and fissile source of power” (p118). The rest of Part One covers, among other things, the rise of Islam and the establishing of Canterbury as a religious centre in the 6th Century.
Christendom Established
Part Two (‘Christendom’) takes us from 754 to 1648. Here we learn how history and tradition established the ways of thinking so familiar today. The chapters largely focus on the popes and their power, and include the crusades. The freeing of Jerusalem from Saracen rule in 1099 is described as an extraordinary feat which “redounded gloriously to the credit of the papacy” (p217). This new impetus and the cause it represented had to have a name, and so it was said that the warrior pilgrims had fought “under the banner of Christianitas: Christendom” (p218).
The remainder of Part Two leads us on to the Reformation and the emergence of Protestantism. For many this will be familiar territory, as will the conflict with scientists such as Galileo and Copernicus.
All Change?
Part Three (‘Modernitas’) starts in 1649 and takes us up to today. Full coverage is given to the Enlightenment, a period when more variants of Christian belief were added to the babel of competing doctrines. But equally, the roots of Christianity were now stretched too deeply, and coiled too implacably, around the foundations of everything that constituted the fabric of Western civilisation to be pulled up with ease.
However, many challenges were still to come, notably through the writings of Darwin, Nietzsche and Marx and the consequences they have had on morality and society. The First World War brought further obstacles to faith, and the rise of Hitler caused a new crisis, especially for the Church in Germany.
Holland has not written about Christianity to substantiate or deny it, rather for what it can reveal about the affairs of humanity.
One chapter highlights the dilemma of the 1960s, the contrast between the peace/love message of the Beatles and Martin Luther King and the conflicts of the Six Day War and Vietnam, together with the power to end it all via nuclear war. In these rapidly changing times, which included the rise of the gay rights movement, where would Christianity stand in the struggle to square the rival demands of tradition and progress?
In his concluding chapter Holland asserts that despite the retreat of Christian belief “the trace elements of Christianity continued to infuse people’s morals and presumptions so utterly that many failed even to detect their presence. Like dust particles so fine as to be invisible to the naked eye, they were breathed in equally by everyone” (p517). An interesting point for discussion!
Holland’s Own Position
Holland writes as an historian, but Christian readers will want to know whether he also writes from a position of personal faith. He is honest enough to share that he was brought up in the faith but that the hope, order and purpose offered by Christianity has now slipped his grasp. He is still fascinated by the origins of Christianity and how it has expanded and taken hold within civilisation, but has no personal conviction of its reality or truth.
He has not written about Christianity to substantiate or deny it, rather for what it can reveal about the affairs of humanity. This is something that readers must understand and accept if they are to benefit from his insights.
The book is a bold one, covering a huge span of history. It does not lack depth, but inevitably has some gaps which may prove disappointing or even surprising (for instance, there is no mention at all of the European Union). But overall this is a worthwhile read for those who want to think more expansively about the role of Christianity within the world into which we have been born.
‘Dominion’ (594pp, hardback, paperback, e-book and audiobook) is available widely from bookshops and online. RRP £25 (hardback).