Book Review: “Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World”

This book was the first time I’d heard of Tom Holland – in fact, it was a request from a reader who offered to purchase it for me, and toss a few coins in the hat to boot (thanks, brother). He didn’t pay me for a glowing review, however, which is what you’re about to read. To put it simply, if you want to understand European history – or religion – or modern politics – or the nature of the existential question which we’re still dealing with today – I recommend that you pick yourself up a copy.

Holland starts his book in 500 BC with the Greeks and traces the history of religious thought all the way up to the present era (the book was published in 2019). In it he covers the most important battles, both physical and ideological, which have come to define our world. The gradual development of our understanding of the divine, and how to effect greater justice in the realm of politics. Finally, he posits the thesis that the modern world is entirely a product of the Christian worldview, something I myself have been saying for years, and is likely not controversial to my regular audience; he shows how the whole framework of human rights and our desire for a negotiated global peace is a direct product of religious thinking pretending to be secular. Worryingly though, it is a religious stance being made by people who were never properly catechized – which I’ll get to in a moment.

The book is no light read – which is why I recommend it. There’s more history and religion in this book than in most universities and churches. If you want to understand the modern world, this is a wonderful place to start. It’s also one of those books that ‘sinks in’ to your consciousness. Perhaps it’s just that I’ve been exploring similar lines of thought for a while now, but shortly after reading it I have trouble remembering where my thoughts end, and Holland’s begin. Perhaps the best way for me to review it is to highlight some of the most interesting ideas I found within it.

What is most high?

This seems to be the eternal existential question which any sapient creature asks itself: what ought I to be doing? What is best in life? Who is the most high?

In our earliest incarnations of religion, it was the God-King, the Son of the Sun. The earthly representative of Marduk who embodied all that was good – strength, health, wisdom, justice – who every year, knelt before the high priest and confessed how he’d failed at embodying Marduk, and swore to do better by his people next year. Christianity flipped this on its head, turning the Most High into an innocent and defenceless baby – and a man despised by those whom He came to save.

I’ve never run into an explanation as thorough as Holland’s on how shocking the idea of a crucified God was. A god who dies and is born again – of those we have plenty of examples. Gods who suffer unjustly, who sacrifice for the common good – those we also had. But the crucifixion was something else. A God who not only died, but died the most ignominious and shameful death imaginable – a death penalty given to rapists and slaves – a God who was the Most High, while also the lowliest man on earth.

Holland explains why the Romans found this so blasphemous, and how Emperor Nero’s debaucheries were an attempt to emulate a ‘God of the People’ by allowing foreigners and slaves to sleep with high-class women. And how this new understanding of the Divine – God the King was also God the Servant – led to the modern sense of empathy that we extend to all people.

Zealotry and Humbleness

Or – the Law and the Spirit. Order and Chaos. The Freedom of those who Obey.

Interwoven throughout the text is this constant interplay of the fundamental existential question. How do we follow the rules without fearing the rules? How do we have faith without engaging in licentious abuse of freedom? This is the question Dostoevsky posed in The Grand Inquisitor – are we to embrace radical freedom and moral responsibility, Christ’s law written into our hearts? Or exchange it for yet another cage, though far more spacious and gilded than that offered by the Romans? Modern consumerism could certainly be described as the latest gilded cage.

Repeatedly throughout the Church’s history we see examples of spiritual excess – Priests going throughout the land and burning peasants for heresy, until finally the King and his nobles were forced to assassinate the holy man under cover of darkness. And yet, we need only look to the 20th century – or Ancient Rome – so see the equal excesses of secularism.

This thread of thought couldn’t help bring to mind that tiresome argument from the Protestants regarding Catholics, Faith or Works? The accusation is that Catholics try and buy their way into heaven through indulgences and rituals, and yet it strikes mes that Catholics are the ones with the deeper and calmer sense of faith (I suppose with a Church like ours you have to fall back on faith). Despite eschewing works, the Protestants make a great deal about being saved, their bold statement bout accepting Christ’s salvation, to such a degree that they no longer need to be kind or charitable or decent – Christ’s blood washes away all. And yet, isn’t this the most bold of indulgences? One grand statement – and then instead of moving into the unknown, with faith that God will protect us should we stumble, they attack life with a cynical self-righteousness, believing that the most awful behaviours are justified at the price of an empty statement.

Where is that line between fear of God and love of God which isn’t presumption? Which isn’t cowardly slavery? I suppose that’s a question that each man must ask himself.

Low Resolution History

Perhaps this is of more interest to me as a Historian and a student of modern politics than it will be to most people, but I was fascinated by the last few chapters which covered periods which I’m intimately familiar with, so intimately familiar that I’ve forgotten about the utility of the low-resolution image.

In particular I’m thinking about his analysis of President George W. Bush. In my own analysis, I tend to look at how Prescott’s political manoeuvring allowed the Bush family to rise to prominence, the cynical geopolitics of the petrodollar, and the nepotistic attitudes of an ensconced elite who view the lives of regular people like playing pieces in a game of Risk – which is true, at high resolution. Holland, meanwhile, looks the interplay between Bush’s Evangelical faith, and his desire to spread Democracy. Which – is an entirely valid interpretation, which provides useful predictions.

You don’t need to go to the level of Quantum Physics when calculating the powder load in your artillery shell.

The same thing goes for so many other modern movements – the spread of gentle treatment to minority groups in recent decades is part of a larger trend which started with Christ, the idea that perhaps even slaves have a valid and meaningful existence. And it’s worth remembering that, while we might find particular and high-resolution behaviours of individuals within those groups to be destructive and often downright evil, this isn’t something that appeared whole cloth in recent years; rather, it’s been part of the spiritual evolution of our species, it’s part of our attempt – imperfect and faltering though it may be – to achieve a greater equity between individuals than the dismal laws of economics and Pareto’s principle would dictate otherwise.

Conclusion

This is a well-cited and well-written book. Holland tells the history of Christendom through stories of individual men, heavily embedding each into a fleshed-out era, allowing the reader to achieve glimpses into the foreign country that is the past. I’m very glad I read it (you’re going to see many ideas from it trickling through my thoughts in the years to come) and a huge thank-you to Jonathan for the commission. I heartily recommend it to all my readers, pick up your copy here.