Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World by Tom Holland
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

A Theory of Christian Civilisation

I have spent the better part of the last 6 months discussing this book with a close friend who happens to be a Catholic priest. I think a summary of that discussion and my conclusion is the best review I can provide.

Tom Holland isn’t a Catholic. But I think he wants to be. This is good news, almost gospel-type good news, because he is able to appreciate fully the paradox that is Christianity. This paradox is what makes Christianity important. And the only way to live it is to recognise how incredibly flawed it is. When it’s inherent contradiction is ignored, it becomes just another oppressive ideology. Being a true Christian means not being entirely convinced that it’s a good idea to be a Christian.

The paradox of Christianity can be expressed simply as the fatal ‘tension’ (as the theologians like to call contradictions) between the Beatitudes and Faith. The Beatitudes are straightforward rules of behaviour. They are very Jewish and simply suggest that the way to live one’s life is by looking out for the lives of others. The Golden Rule of Matthew’s gospel is merely a re-statement of of the command of Leviticus and the then recently dead Rabbi Hillel: “What is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow: this is the whole Torah; the rest is the explanation; go and learn.”

And not only in Judaism. Exactly the same sentiments are expressed in ancient Egyptian papyri, for example, “If thou be among people make for thyself love, the beginning and end of the heart.” is found in the Instructions of Vizier Ptahhotep of around 2375–2350 BCE, that is, considerably before the Hebrew Scritures. Sanskrit manuscripts, Persian, Tamil, Hindi, Sikh, Buddhist, and Confucian scriptures, as well as in the aphorisms of Greek and Roman philosophy and the Hadith of the Prophet in Islam express the same ethical command. Has Holland never read Marcus Aurelius or Seneca whose De ira served as a model for Christian ethics? The Golden Rule is the closest thing we have to a universal ethic. And yet it is an ethic which is practiced more as an exception rather than a rule. Those who honour it consistently are generally considered saints; and no one thinks there are many of them.

It was the Christian, arguably the first Christian, Paul of Tarsus, who believed he had found the reason for this inability of mankind to abide by a code of behaviour which was recognised as universally beneficial. The reason for mankind’s failure was simple: a lack of faith. Not faith in the Rule, but faith in that which was the source of the Rule, through which the Rule gained not just its authority but its persistence in human behaviour.

For Paul, this source was Jesus, whom he termed the Christ, the anointed one of God, who not only demonstrated the Rule in his life and death but was the Rule in himself. Based on Paul’s logic, faith in Jesus Christ was the necessary and sufficient condition to carry out the Rule. Without this faith, mankind would continually lapse into its traditional ethical failure. With faith, the behavioural ethic of the Rule would follow. Faith would provide the motive power which the Rule otherwise lacked. As Paul put the matter, the Rule would become internalised, written, as he said, on the heart. The Rule was not to be obeyed but to be lived in light of faith.

This is the theory of Christianity in a nutshell. As Paul put it about himself: we all know what is right but we can’t bring ourselves to do what is right. Faith is the answer, the missing link between ethical principle and action. One can argue with the theory but not before recognising that’s it is a revolutionary concept. Nothing like it had ever been proposed before and certainly nothing as influential has been proposed since. It is an existential metaphysics with a knock-out punch; and it has obviously had enormous appeal historically.

But things get tricky very quickly in a way that Paul apparently hadn’t thought through. Faith in an idea, any idea, even the idea of Christ, is itself contrary to the absolute reign of the Beatitudes. As is clear in the Pauline letters to his congregations, faith in Jesus could and quickly did become myopic, with the result that his congregants were frequently quite horrid to one another - as a matter of faith. Paul had to remind them constantly just what faith was meant to do for them but manifestly hadn’t.

And so it has been ever since in that European civilisation which is frequently called Christendom. Faith becomes an ideology, the ‘truths’ of which are used to justify some particularly inhumane behaviour. Starting with expulsions from the early church, continuing to the persecution of heretics who viewed the truths slightly differently, to the mounting of the Crusades against those who had different truths altogether, through to the ultimate horror of the Holocaust and the subsequent self-righteous smugness of those like the American evangelicals who interpret faith as a mandate to close borders and imprison families, faith has more often than not overcome the behaviours recommended by the beatitudes. Faith collides with the Rule; and the Rule consistently ends up bested.

Holland accepts that this has been the case. Christianity has failed in its own terms. But, he claims, it is precisely those terms by which Christianity redeems itself. Faith is never allowed to forget its practical human import. Even when it does, there are members of the faithful that are there to, as it were, put the ideologies of faith back in their place. This dialectic between Faith and the Beatitudes, he seems to believe, is what is unique to Christianity. So he can therefore claim that the ‘values’ of European civilisation are authentically Christian.

This is clearly nonsense. Faith is susceptible to whatever ideology happens to be around at the moment. Faith drops the demands of the beatitudes as quickly as any other civilisation, rationalises its cruelty, and gets dragged back to humanness only kicking and screaming just like any other ideology. To claim that it is Christianity which keeps the Golden Rule alive in the world is close to an obscenity. It is certainly a gross insult to those who recognise the rule as an inherent part of their own entirely un-Christian culture.

On the contrary, no other culture provides greater temptation to forget the beatitudes than Christianity. Faith itself is an attractive ideology. It presents itself as an irresistible solution to all social as well as spiritual ills, when in fact it is primarily a way of creating tribal identity. Faith is the only unique characteristic of Christianity. All the content - divine incarnation, the suffering and dying god, the return from the dead - derives from ancient cultural tropes. Paul invented faith as the key to life, both here and in the hereafter. Faith is a ready-made container in which to deposit the ideology at hand and to justify it using these tropes.

In short, Faith is easy; the Rule is hard. Faith rationalises self-interests; the Rule subverts them. Historically and empirically, there is no relation between Faith and the Rule except as contradictions. Christian values are oxymoronic. Those principles of behaviour which constitute our cultural ethic come from elsewhere than Christian teaching; and they are obscured by that teaching.

So I think I understand Holland’s position. Pauline Christianity is a daring, wildly hopeful theory of human existence. It attracts those who already are aware of the Rule and are bemused by the inability of human society to abide by it. The brutality and horrors of the Roman Empire were exactly the right conditions for its spread. But Holland is also aware that Pauline faith is a spiritual black hole. Once entered into, faith extinguishes the Rule entirely. Holland therefore sits on the edge of Christianity, quite correctly fascinated by its possibilities but suspicious of its promise.

If Holland’s were the attitude of many, it would be possible to accept Christianity as a force for good in the world. But his attitude is not. His spiritual position is idiosyncratic, eccentric even. Others will understand his history of European Christianity as a smug vindication of their cultural superiority. Dominion will reinforce the tendency of faith to justify all manner of evil. I suspect that he knows that Paul got the causality wrong. Faith does not generate adherence to the Rule. Rather, as the Greeks knew, practice with the Rule encourages both observance of the Rule and confidence that there might indeed be a cosmic benevolence who cares.

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