Tom Holland, Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World (Little, Brown, 2019) 624 pp.

Tom Holland is the best kind of popular history writer. He is a good researcher who knows what can be stated with emphasis and what needs to be judiciously hedged. He is a fine story-teller, who can weave bare facts into a smooth and engaging narrative. He is provocative and startling enough to keep the reader on their toes and turning pages. And he is quietly and wryly funny. He displays all of these qualities in this fine new book, but it is his role as wily provocateur that will cause it to ruffle feathers in certain quarters.

One of the things that often startles me about the way most anti-theist activists speak or write about Christianity is their almost visceral emotionalism. I happen to be a person raised a Christian who abandoned any faith pretty readily in my late teens and who lives in a highly secular country in a largely post-Christian society. On occasion certain Christians, particularly some prelates or politicians, will annoy me with a particularly stupid statement or action, but on the whole I can regard Christianity as I regard any faith – something that other people do that interests me largely as a historical phenomenon.

Many of those who are the focus of this blog, however, cannot seem to get Christianity out of their systems. A large number of them are, like me, ex-Christians, but ones who seem still mentally entangled in their former faith. Never able to emerge from a kind of juvenile angry apostasy, they seem impelled to strike out at it at every turn. They have to constantly remind others – and, it seems, themselves – of its manifest stupidity and wickedness.

This is why many of them cannot fathom how I can debunk myths about Christian history without also somehow being a kind of “Christian apologist” or “crypto-Christian”. It is why noting that the Church actually did not teach the earth was flat, that Christians did not burn down the Great Library of Alexandria or that the Galileo Affair was not some black-and-white moral parable of “science versus religion” elicits frantic efforts on the part of some to salvage something of these stories so that Christianity does not get off scot-free. It is also why the Jesus Myth thesis seems so convincing to many of these anti-Christian zealots while it appears clumsy and contrived to pretty much everyone else.

Bias makes people do and think strange things. It also clouds and blinkers vision. A true unbeliever is someone who can look at their former faith and not just see the warts, but can see the all. A true post-Christian can see the oppression, murder, persecution and horror done as a result of Christianity, but can also see the other side of the historical ledger: the beneficial elements that Christianity has given to western culture and, through it, to the modern world generally.

Tom Holland is an unbeliever and also someone who was raised a Christian. And he too is someone who abandoned that belief early in life: he blames a fascination with dinosaurs – a gateway drug for many a budding young historian and religious sceptic. But in his latest book he turns his attention to Christianity’s impact on western thinking and to what will be, to many, an uncomfortable thesis. He argues that most of the things that we consider to be intrinsic and instinctive human values are actually nothing of the sort; they are primarily and fundamentally the product of Christianity and would not exist without the last 2000 years of Christian dominance on our culture.

He knows this claim will not sit well with some and so early in the book he invokes Richard Dawkins:

“‘It is the case that since we are all 21st century people, we all subscribe to a pretty widespread consensus of what’s right and what’s wrong.’ So Richard Dawkins, the world’s most evangelical atheist, has declared. To argue that, in the West, the ‘pretty widespread consensus of what’s right and what’s wrong’ derives from Christian teachings and presumptions can risk seeming, in societies of many faiths and none, almost offensive.”

(Holland, p. xxvi)

There is probably no “almost” about it – some have already found Holland’s argument decidedly offensive and said so in no uncertain terms (see below). But Holland is a wide-ranging reader and, as a result, a well-rounded thinker. This is not light pop history, even though it is an entertaining read. This is a book to provoke thought and to change perspectives. Which is, of course, the best kind of book.

Neither Jew nor Greek, Slave nor Free

Paul of Tarsus was not a man to do anything by half. He tells us that when he first encountered the Jesus sect he did not just disagree with its claims, he also went out of his way to shut it down through active persecution. Then, on having what he believed was a vision of the risen Jesus, he switched his zeal completely in the opposite direction and became the sect’s most vigorous promoter, founding communities of believers in the new message of a crucified Messiah across the eastern Mediterranean.

He also drove his thinking about his new beliefs to their logical extremes, much to the discomfort of some of his fellow believers. The idea that the coming Messiah was not simply coming to redeem and restore Israel, but would rule and redeem the earth and so all nations already existed in some forms of Jewish thought at the time. But Paul took this idea and ran with it – hard. In his view, this meant Jesus had replaced the old covenant with a new one – one that applied equally to everyone, Jew and Gentile. It meant that practices of the old covenant that he, like his fellow devout Jews, had always considered so important, were now no longer necessary at all. And, to Paul, it had to mean that everyone was saved equally. And that meant everyone:

“There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.”

(Gal 3:28)

This idea of universal equality did have some precedent in Paul’s world. He was a Jew, but he spoke Greek and lived in an environment permeated by the influence of Hellenic culture and thinking; the Judaism of his time had, despite conservative suspicion of all things pagan, absorbed a great deal of Greek philosophy. So Holland notes that the Greeks developed the notion of “natural law” that applied to all people equally. The Stoics were insistent on this as a basis for their moral understanding of the universe:

“Animating the entire universe, God was active reason: the Logos. …. To live in accordance with nature, therefore, was to live in accordance with God. Male or female, Greek or barbarian, free or slave, all were equally endowed with the ability to distinguish right from wrong.

(Holland, p. 27)

But while both the Stoics and Paul accepted this intrinsic equality in principle, and Paul derived it specifically from a crucified and risen Messiah, neither radically questioned their own deeply hierarchical society – a culture that accepted men as superior to women, saw “barbarians” as inferior to the “civilised” and was built on the backs of millions of slaves, who could be bought, sold, bred, tortured, raped and killed.

Aristotle justified slavery as natural, claiming some humans were slaves by nature, lacking the moral reason to be regarded as the equals of free men. The Stoics, with their greater acknowledgement of the implications of natural law, had a more humane and egalitarian attitude toward slavery. But while they disagreed that nature made some people slaves, they accepted it as inevitable that fortune would result in some people being subjugated by others and so saw slavery as distasteful but inevitable: a necessary evil. Even the great Stoic writer, Epictetus – himself a former slave – never criticised the institution of slavery as unjust. He too saw it as an outworking of fate and a result of the great chain of cause and effect stretching back and forth in time. Slavery, for Epictetus and the Stoics, was in the category of things “not up to us”.

Of course, a learned Stoic was far more likely to be a slave owner than a slave, and one like Seneca owned many thousands of human beings thanks to his immense wealth. His ethical advice and that of other Stoics did tend toward humane treatment of slaves, but this was primarily for the moral good of the master, not on account of the intrinsic worth of the slave. Seneca could write “‘They are slaves!’ some say. I say they are humans!” to urge slave owners to treat their slaves better, but he never condemned the whole institution as evil. No ancient philosopher did.

Similarly, early Christians stopped short of the – to us, rather obvious – implications of “there is no longer slave or free …. you are one in Christ Jesus”. Paul himself seems to have held a very Stoic attitude to slavery in practice, advising Christian slaves in Corinth “Were you a slave when called? Do not be concerned about it.” (1Cor 7:21) Though he adds an enigmatic comment that has been variously interpreted as “although if you can gain your freedom, do so” (NIV) or perhaps “even if you can gain your freedom, make use of your present condition now more than ever” (NRSV). Epictetus would have approved of either version. Later texts attributed to Paul were more explicit in their endorsement of slavery as an institution, with Ephesians 6:5 ordering “slaves, obey your earthly masters with fear and trembling”, though Ephesians 6:9 advises “Masters …. stop threatening [your slaves], for you know that both of you have the same Master in heaven, and with him there is no partiality.” Colossians 3:22–25 assures slaves that they should obey their masters “in everything, not only while being watched and in order to please them, but wholeheartedly” because assigned work “is done for the Lord and not for your masters” – a text Christian slave masters in later centuries cherished, for obvious reasons.

So Christians of the first three centuries of the faith had plenty of scriptural and cultural reasons to justify slavery as an institution. Some saw it as a regrettable but inevitably natural result of the Fall of Man and Original Sin: a position expressed by Gregory of Nazianzus, John Chrysostom, Ambrose, “Ambrosiaster” and, most forcibly and most influentially, by Augustine. Others saw slavery as beneficial for the slave as a remedy for their own sins, with shades of the Aristotelian idea that some people were just naturally servile: here we find Basil of Caesarea, but there are elements of this view in Ambrose and Augustine. Or it could be held that, ultimately, only the body of a man can be enslaved, not his mind nor his soul: so thought “Ambrosiaster” and, again, Ambrose, who had not entirely consistent thoughts on the matter.

But the very first ancient thinker to question whether slavery was intrinsically evil as an institution was the younger brother of Basil of Caesarea and family friend of Gregory of Nazianzus – the “Cappadocian Father”, Gregory of Nyssa.

“The Equivalent of the Likeness of God”

Gregory of Nyssa (c. 335 – c. 395) was a remarkable member of a remarkable family. As already mentioned, he was younger brother of Basil but was one of nine children, five of whom are considered saints. The family was aristocratic, learned and fiercely Christian; Gregory’s paternal grandmother, Macrina the Elder, was also regarded as a saint and his maternal grandfather had been executed in the Persecution of Maximinus II. He later piously claimed that his only teachers were his brother Basil and “Paul, John and the rest of the Apostles and prophets”, but he clearly received a traditional education in the classics, philosophy and rhetoric and was heavily influenced by the neoplatonist school of Plotinus. Christian theologians today note his writings on the Trinity, but it was his conception the equal salvation of all that seems to have led to his radical condemnation of slavery.

Here he was influenced by Origen. As Holland notes, it was Origen (c. 184 – c. 253) who had greatly developed the idea, formerly championed by Justin Martyr and Clement of Alexandria, that far from rejecting “pagan” philosophy, it gave Christian theologians a superb toolkit:

“Christianity, in Origen’s opinion, was not merely compatible with philosophy, but the ultimate expression of it. ‘No one can truly do duty to God,’ he declared, ‘who does not think like a philosopher’. …. ‘No subject was forbidden to us,’ one of his pupils would later recall, ….’Every doctrine – Greek or not – we were encouraged to study. All of the good things of the mind were ours to enjoy.'”

(Holland, p. 104)

Origen set about trying to apply a philosophical rigour to Christian beliefs, which was no easy task since there was a great deal in those beliefs that were strange, contradictory and paradoxical. Exactly how Jesus could be both God and Man was a question that would vex theology for centuries to come, but Origen – a fierce opponent of “heretics”, many of whom denied the genuine humanity of Jesus, seeing him as a mystical abstraction – was greatly struck by the power of the idea of God becoming a weak human:

“‘For since we see in Christ some things so human that they appear to share every aspect in the common frailty of humanity, and some things so divine that they are manifestly the expression of the primal and ineffable nature of the Divine, the narrowness of human understanding is inadequate to cope.'”

(Quoted in Holland, p. 106-7)

Origen wondered at seeing man in God through Christ. Thinking in the opposite direction, Gregory of Nyssa wondered at seeing God in man; and by this he meant all men, including slaves. In his Fourth Homily on Ecclesiastes, Gregory does not mince words:

“What price did you put on rationality? How many obols did you reckon the equivalent of the likeness of God? How many staters did you get for selling the being shaped by God? ‘God said, let us make man in our own image and likeness’ (Gen 1:26). If he is in the likeness of God, and rules the whole earth, and has been granted authority over everything on earth from God, who is his buyer, tell me? Who is his seller?”

There is a great deal of Seneca in what Gregory says, but unlike the Stoics, Gregory of Nazianzus or his brother Basil, Gregory does not temper his condemnation by making excuses for the institution of slavery to justify its continuation. In defiance of all ancient thinkers before him, he declares it to be simply wrong – end of story.

Unfortunately, it was not the end of the story. Gregory was not the great speaker or influential thinker his brother was and, as Holland notes “Gregory’s impassioned insistence that to own slaves was ‘to set one’s own power above God’s’ … fell like seed among thorns” (p. 124-5). It would be centuries before later Christians would come to the same conclusions and preach an equality of all men that would give rise to the modern Abolition Movement. Christianity, drawing on Basil, Ambrose and Augustine, continued to justify slavery more or less as Aristotle or the Stoics had done.

While Gregory noted his brother Basil as his teacher, in his insistence on the equal worth of all humans he was more influenced by his older sister Macrina. The eldest child in the family, it was Macrina who had convinced Gregory to abandon an aristocratic civil career and take up an ecclesiastical post. She was also well educated and highly intelligent, but she took on an ascetic life and devoted herself to caring for the sick and the poor with the passionate intensity that marked all of the family’s endeavours. In a world where infanticide was widely practised, with infant girls being the most commonly abandoned to death, Macrina searched garbage dumps for babies left to die and brought them home to raise. When she died, Holland notes, “it was not his brother, the celebrated bishop …. whom Gregory thought to compare to Christ, but his sister” (p. 126).

Today, the idea that we should care for others, help the weak, give to assist the needy and feel sorrow at the afflictions of the vulnerable and exploited is thought to be normal and obvious. TV ads for charities and aid organisations do not have to argue all humans have a right to dignity by merit of being human, they simply assume we all understand this. So it is difficult for us to imagine how radical it was for people like Gregory and Macrina or the others Holland highlights in this part of his book (Martin of Tours, Paulinus of Nola) to help the helpless purely because they recognised the paradox of a divine Christ as a suffering human being in these fellow humans. Rich people had done good works before. Ancient nobles were expected to endow great public buildings, hold games, races and gladiatorial shows, give free grain and bread to the populace of their city or support centres of learning or healing. But this was because that was seen as reflecting their dignitas and to their glory and esteem. It was not because they saw the people these acts assisted as their equals, equally reflecting the divine and so intrinsically worthy of equal dignity. That idea would have been alien, bizarre and even repellant. The fact that it is familiar, normal and attractive to us shows, as Holland argues, that we are like fish swimming in essentially Christian water. We barely even notice we are doing it.

‘Reformatio’, Revolutions and Enlightenment

One of the things that makes Holland’s book thought provoking (and perhaps, for some, provocative) is the way he teases out ideas that we take for granted and shows them to have Christian origins. The division between “religion” and the “secular”, for example, is so fundamental to the western understanding that most people simply assume it and would never consider that it had an origin, let alone an one rooted in Christian theology. But before Christianity a saeculum was a length of time roughly equal to the likely length of a person’s life or the span of human recollection. The passing of a saeculum was a significant event for the Etruscans and its sacredness was marked by the Romans with spectacles and games. To the Romans, religio did not refer to something distinct from what we would call “secular” affairs – no such separation existed. It referred, as Cicero defined it, to the proper performance of the rites owed to the gods or a fitting level of piety and reverence for them.

But writing in the wake of the sack of Rome in 410 and the increasing tumult of the spiralling collapse of the Western Roman Empire, Augustine of Hippo needed a way to contrast the transitory and fleeting nature of the world around him, with its cities that fall to barbarians and abandoned estates and villas that crumble to ruins, with the eternity of the things of God, that endure unchanged forever:

This was why Augustine, looking for a word to counterpoint the unchanging eternity of the City of God … seized upon [saeculum]. Things caught up in the flux of mortals’ existence, bounded by their memories, forever changing upon the passage of the generations: all these, so Augustine declared, were secularia – ‘secular things’.

(Holland, p. 160)

“Religion” or religio was to have an even longer evolution: from “the proper performance of rites” to the word used to describe the separated life of monks and ascetics to, finally, our modern understanding of it as the opposite of “secular”.

This division of life into that which is “secular” and that which is “religious” is peculiarly western and relatively recent. In a later chapter Holland traces the strange effects of its imposition by colonial westerners on cultures where it really did not fit. So Indian rites and cultural practices that were intrinsic to life on the sub-continent were made to conform to western conceptions of “religion” and “the secular” by creating the concept of something called “the Hindu religion” or “Hinduism”, where a whole variety of “religious”-looking practices, traditions, ceremonial and ideas were jammed, rather awkwardly, into the western concept of “religion” and given a neat label.

In medieval Europe, however, this new conception of a division between “the secular” and “the religious” was to have revolutionary effects. With the fall of the Western Empire and the centuries of chaos and fragmentation that followed, the Church in the west needed new powerful patrons for protection. The barbarian warlords and kings converted to the Catholic faith, but in the process the Church came to be dominated by its new protectors. Much of Western Christianity took on a distinct and oddly Germanic flavour, with Christ often depicted as a chieftain surrounded by his disciples as a comitatus, or warband of followers. Off on the western fringes of Europe, Celtic Christianity took on even more strange characteristics. And the Church became increasingly subsumed within a complex network of obligations, exchanges of favours and lordship over lands in return for services and dues. Bishops and priests were appointed by local potentates, rich church benefices were reserved for relatives and allies of the dominant lord in a given region and ecclesiastical offices were regularly bought and sold.

But, beginning in the tenth century, a new breed of churchmen began to preach for reformatio – a reshaping of the Church to purify it. Beginning at the great independent monastery of Cluny, these reformers first condemned outside interference in the running of monasteries, the imposition of relatives of local lords as abbots and the requirement of dues from monastic lands. Preaching libertas, these monastic reformers’ ideas of a separation of their religio from secularia spread to the wider church and in 1073 a fervent Cluniac reforming monk became pope. Hildebrand of Sovana, as Pope Gregory VII, took the idea of reformatio to new heights, imposing clerical celibacy, condemning the practice of buying church appointments and fiercely resisting the “secular” dominance of the Church by worldly rulers. This led to a famous showdown with the Holy Roman Emperor Henry IV that eventually saw an excommunicated and penitent Henry forced to walk barefoot in the snow to seek the pope’s forgiveness at Canossa in January 1077.

This clash was just the first skirmish in the long Empire-Papacy disputes and – contrary to the New Atheist fantasy of the medieval world as some kind of “theocracy” where the Church was dominant and supreme – was just one of many bitter conflicts between the Medieval Church and secular rulers. One of the effects of these conflicts was the evolution of a new and uniquely western European idea that we now take for granted: a division between what we call “church and state”, with the “secular” and the “religious” interacting, but occupying distinct conceptual spheres. All of this would have been baffling to Cicero.

The concept of reformatio also never went away. Even though the reformers of Cluny staged a successul revolution and effectively captured the Church, remaking it in their image, successive waves of reform would continue, with new reformers calling for renewal, purification and change. Luther and what we call “the Reformation” was just one of these cycles of renewal and notable mainly because, unlike the monks of Cluny, the reformers did not manage to capture the Church wholesale and so formed their own national churches.

And the spirit of reformatio lived on into the modern era, with the language and the impulses of Voltaire and the philosophes of the Enlightenment acknowledging they were, in many ways, following in the footsteps of Luther and Calvin. Voltaire was, of course, famously anti-clerical and sceptical of the Church, but the impulses of the Enlightenment were deeply rooted in a now well-established tradition of renewal, purification, a freeing from unnecessary constraints, an overturning of the old to refresh and revive.

Similarly, the revolutions that reshaped the modern western world from Europe to America also had their origin in this very western and, ultimately, Christian idea of renewal and purification. It is ironic that movements that saw Notre-Dame (briefly) reconsecrated as “the Temple of Reason” in Revolutionary France or the establishment of a 3.5 million strong “League of Militant Atheists” in Soviet Russia had a fundamentally Christian impulse deep in their genes.

Tolkien versus Hitler

Holland has a good eye for illustrative symmetries. In August 1914 a young Adolf Hitler was delighted at the outbreak of war but failed his physical when he tried to join the Austrian Army and so managed to join the Bavarian Army instead and ended up fighting for Germany. In Britain, a twenty-two year old J.R.R. Tolkien was recently married to his childhood sweetheart and still finishing his degree at Oxford, so he was far less enthusiastic about the war and delayed enlistment until July 1915. But this meant, a year later, these two very different men faced each other across the battlefield of the Somme.

Both saw the world as a clash between darkness and light, though each had a vastly different conception of what “the light” was. A devout Catholic, Tolkien accepted a theology derived ultimately from Augustine: with the eternity of “the City of God” standing against secularia in a fallen world stained by Original Sin. This can make Tolkien’s vision seem somewhat gloomy, especially to those who do not share his beliefs, though there is a stolid (and very British) nobility in what he has the elf queen Galadriel call “the Long Defeat”; the ongoing, impossible but still important battle against evil. For Tolkien, no victory was complete, evil would always rise again and even victory brings loss. But he also held up hope and friendship as essential in the struggle.

Holland tells a touching anecdote about an older Tolkien in 1944, now an Oxford don and also a volunteer air raid warden, sitting up talking with his fellow warden, the great Jewish historian Cecil Roth. When they went to bed, Roth noticed that Tolkien did not have a watch, so he loaned him his own to ensure he did not oversleep and miss morning mass. And early the next morning the Jew looked in on the devout Catholic to make sure he was up. “It seemed” Tolkien wrote in a letter to his son later that day, “like a fleeting glimpse of an unfallen world” (p. 461).

If the vision of the world Tolkien brought from the Somme was one of hope and friendship in a long defeat, Hitler’s was of merciless dominance and raw willpower resulting in a ultimate glorious victory. A natural pessimist, Tolkien had hope because he saw God’s grace as “like the light from an invisible lamp”, deriving ultimately from God’s sacrifice as a broken figure on the cross. A fierce optimist, Hitler made sure his followers had no time for this weak, Jewish stuff. One SS magazine was typically scornful of useless Christian qualities like compassion:

“Harping on and on that God died on the cross out of pity for the weak, the sick and the sinners, they then demand that the genetically diseased be kept alive in the name of a doctrine of pity that goes against nature, and of a misconceived notion of humanity.”

(quoted in Holland, p. 460)

The Nazis had a notion of humanity based on the strong rightfully dominating the weak, the healthy removing the sick and the “superior race” exterminating the “genetically diseased”. While they were forced by political expediency to pretend otherwise, their doctrine of mercilessness was patently and knowingly anti-Christian – it represented a rejection and reversal of everything people like Tolkien stood for and everything the world had inherited from Christianity. Yet it was Hitler who came to be rejected and defeated 988 years short of the Nazis’ projected “thousand year Reich”, while Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, a paean to compassion, humility and friendship, came to be one of the most loved and most read novels of the twentieth century.

Holland’s final chapters explore the paradox that, in the west at least, we live in a post-Christian world but one that is so permeated by the ideas and principles that he traces over the course of his history of Christianity that we are like fish swimming in the water of Christian thinking – so used to it that we do not notice it is there. So the Beatles could sing “all you need is love” and not need to explain what that means or why it “makes sense”. Or rich, self-indulgent rock stars can put on a concert to preach compassion and aid for an African famine and see a global audience raise millions of dollars to help strangers on the other side of the planet. Both messages would be at least rather odd to the citizens of ancient Rome or Athens, but they are perfectly normal to us; so much so that we struggle to articulate why.

Holland’s book does not shy away from the dark side of Christian history. On the contrary, he emphasises it to the point that some Christian reviewers believe he overdoes that part of the narrative: a likely sign he has actually got the balance about right. But his point is that “the standards by which [these Christians] stand condemned are themselves Christian” (p. 525). He concludes:

“Nor, even if the churches across the West continue to empty does it seem likely that these standards will quickly change. ‘God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong.’ [1Cor 1:27] This is the myth that we in the West persist in clinging to. Christendom, in that sense, remains Christendom still.”

(Holland, p. 525)

Criticism

Holland’s book is long and wide ranging and so it is unlikely that everyone is going to agree with everything he argues. That said, reading it as a harsh critic of any work of popular history, I found nothing I can say was factually wrong, at least in the sections that cover periods and subjects I know well. Holland is very careful in his language and fully aware that sources cannot be taken at face value and much in history is uncertain. For example, many popular authors choose drama over care when they describe the Albigensian Crusade and the infamous declaration by the papal legate Arnaud-Amaury when asked how the crusaders could tell which inhabitants of the fallen city of Béziers were heretics: “Kill them all, God knows his own”. Holland tells the anecdote, but adds judiciously “So, at any rate, it was later reported”. He then notes that the later story, at the very least “spoke powerfully of the peculiar horror that shadowed the crusaders’ minds” (p. 245). Even if the lurid story is untrue (and it probably is), the fact is tens of thousands of citizens of Béziers were put to the sword in the name of faith.

On other points Holland takes a position which is highly defensible, even though there are other interpretations. One of the problems with the kind of popular historical overview that Dominion represents is the author usually cannot stop the flow of his narrative to pause and present alternative views and then argue for a particular position. Holland usually at least indicates that there are other views, though at times he presents a single view with a great deal of emphasis and without any indication of an alternative. For example, he argues that our whole concept of homosexuality is a recent development and one ultimately based on Pauline theology. Before Christianity, Holland argues, there was no conception of a homosexual orientation: some men – many of them, actually – had sex with other men. This was not seen as some kind of “orientation”, but definitely was seen in terms of power relationships. There was no shame in having sex with a man, but there was great shame attached to being the passive partner.

Of course, all this is highly debatable and the debate continues. In particular, James Davidson has argued in The Greeks and Greek Love: A Bold New Exploration of the Ancient World (2007) that something very much like our modern conception of homosexuality actually did exist in the ancient world. Others have taken up this argument, while many retain the older position of Kenneth J. Dover that Holland favours. Some of Holland’s more over-eager online critics have tried to claim, erroneously, that Davidson’s view is the current consensus (it is not) and that Holland is simply ignorant of the debate. I know from personal correspondence with Holland that he certainly is not, but an indication that there is such a debate would have been useful. I have been harshly critical of Catherine Nixey for presenting one view as though it is fact, and while Holland is not as guilty of it as Nixey, it does leave him open to being dismissed for being slanted in what he presents.

Many of his critics have little interest in the nuances of his argument, however: they simply reject his thesis wholesale. And here, gentle reader, we find – yet again and with wearisome inevitability – the indefatigable polemicist, failed academic and unemployed blogger, Dr. Richard C. Carrier (PhD – he has a doctorate, you see). Carrier has not actually read Holland’s book: he is much too busy peddling his fringe Jesus Mythicism thesis and writing his latest effort, Jesus From Outer Space: What the Earliest Christians Really Believed about Christ, which seems to be a kind of “Mythicism for Dummies” and will be released, appropriately, on April Fool’s Day this year [Edit – publication of this essential tome has been delayed until September 1, 2020]. But Carrier took a little time out from his busy unemployment to write a briskly dismissive rejection of Holland’s argument. He was responding to a pre-publication teaser piece Holland wrote for the Spectator, “Thank God for Western Values” (20 April, 2019), which was a broad summary of the themes of his forthcoming book. Holland concludes:

“The cross, that ancient tool of imperial power, remains what it has always been: the fitting symbol of a transfiguration in the affairs of humanity as profound and far-reaching as any in history. …. It is the audacity of it …. that serves to explain, more surely than anything else, the sheer strangeness of Christianity, and of the civilisation to which it gave birth.”

Carrier, the reflex anti-theist and anti-Christian activist, was having none of this. In a characteristically splenetic piece entitled “No, Tom Holland, It Wasn’t Christian Values That Saved the West”, Carrier dismisses Holland as “another amateur” and a “novelist” with “no degrees in history, and no advanced degrees whatever” and declares categorically “everything he says is false”.

Carrier then congratulates himself, declaring “I’ve already refuted Holland’s entire thesis”, linking to several of his blog posts and book chapters in atheist polemics, all of which dispute various things that … Holland does not actually say. But when he does bother to contend with Holland’s Spectator piece as opposed to what he imagines is Holland’s thesis, it is the idea that the conception of God as a pitiful crucified human victim that was uniquely significant that gets Carrier especially grumpy. First he sneers at the idea that the key Easter story was unique in any way:

“That idea did not come from Christianity. Even insofar as Easter itself is even Christian. After all, it actually incorporates a bunch of pagan holiday stuff now—there are no bunnies laying eggs in the Bible; and Eastre, the German goddess of fertility after which Easter even takes its name, is very definitely a pagan deity. “

This is typically sloppy stuff from Carrier, given that there is no evidence that the bunnies and eggs of Easter are “pagan” at all, no evidence that Eostre (not “Eastre”) was “German” and the name of this local Anglo-Saxon deity is about the only pagan thing about Easter (see “Easter, Ishtar, Eostre and Eggs” for a summary of the evidence and scholarship on this). As usual, Carrier’s bluster and bravado outweigh his knowledge and competence.

Nuanced points are, as usual, lost on Carrier. Holland notes Richard Dawkins musing on why he, an atheist and secularist, prefers the sound of church bells to that of the Islamic call to prayer and says that “a preference for church bells over the sound of Muslims praising God does not just emerge by magic”; pretty obviously making the point that we are all products of our cultural context. Yet Carrier misses this simple point completely, sneering:

“Holland’s following implication that Christian music (specifically, the lamest kind: church bells chiming) is “prettier” than Muslim’s singing (or even the Arabic language) is pretty much just imperialist pap. I don’t even agree. Perhaps because I’m not an imperialist dick.”

Anyone who is not a sophomoric jerk (“lamest”, “I don’t even”, “dick”) would notice that Holland makes no claim that church bells are “prettier” (though Dawkins certainly does) and that Carrier clearly did not understand what Holland is actually saying. Much of his piece is at this level of inattentive undergraduate spluttering and blundering.

When Carrier does manage to actually engage with something Holland is saying, the results are not much better. In sweeping strokes, he declares grandly that “dignitas and its related ideas, even in the sense of the common worth of persons, was already a widely known pagan concept. So Christianity can’t claim to have invented it”. But Holland does not say that it was invented by Christians, rather that it was given a new and far wider application by them – one we accept so naturally now that people like Carrier mistakenly read it back into the writings of his “Aristotelians, Epicureans, and Stoics”.

Much of the rest of his piece is pettifogging mixed with near constant self-promotion and aggrandisement. The remainder is simply wrongheaded. Objecting to Holland noting that Christianity, uniquely, gave us the idea of a God who was “closer to the weak than to the mighty, to the poor than to the rich” Carrier declares (citing himself, yet again) “humiliated, humbled, crippled, castrated, crucified, and defiled gods and heroes already abounded in paganism”. Leaving aside infelicities like his claim the Sumerian goddess Inanna was “crucified”, the problem is that no story of any pagan deity who happened to suffer some humiliation took on the significance of the crucified Jesus in Christianity. No-one taught we should be kind to strangers by citing Inanna’s death or Attis’ castration. Again, Carrier completely misses the point. Then again, Holland’s points tend to require a degree of nuanced thinking and, as with all fundamentalist apologists, that is definitely not Carrier’s strong point.

Turning from a blogger ranting to his peanut gallery, Holland’s arguments got a slightly more measured and intelligent critical analysis when New Atheist luminary and philosopher, A.C. Grayling, debated him on Justin Brierley’s Christian radio show/podcast Unbelievable in December 2019. A video of their conversation can be found below:

The whole discussion is well worth watching and a full analysis of the points argued on both sides would take an article in itself [Edit – see The Great Myths 8: The Loss of Ancient Learning for that detailed analysis]. But what is astonishing is the way many of Grayling’s arguments are based on a bizarre caricature of history. A caricature so ludicrous and riddled with hoary myths, misconceptions and howlers that Holland, at several points, seems almost at a loss as to how to respond. And Grayling is, it needs to be remembered, a former Professor of Philosophy at Birkbeck, University of London, and the current master of the New College of the Humanities. That he has such a pathetically bad grasp of history is testament, yet again, to how crippling biases can make intelligent people very stupid.

Some of the things Grayling accepts as historical are complete myths, such as his invocation of the so-called “droit de seigneur” whereby medieval lords were supposed to have a legal right to have sex with the wife of any of his vassals on the night of their wedding. Grayling seems to actually think this happened, even though whole books have been written debunking this myth and showing how it arose – see Alain Boureau The Lord’s First Night: The Myth of the Droit de Cuissage (University of Chicago Press, 1998). This myth was a favourite of Voltaire, who never let facts get in the way of a nice jab at the Middle Ages, and is perpetuated in popular culture to this day by things like Mel Gibson’s gloriously silly movie Braveheart. Which gives us an indication of where the master of the New College of the Humanities is getting his information about history.

Other elements of Grayling’s weird understanding of the past involves a hopelessly mangled understanding of things. At around the 27 minute mark in the video above, Holland gets understandably annoyed at Grayling’s claims about Christians destroying ancient texts, taking issue with the idea that “bands of Christians roamed around destroying copies of Aeschylus”. He notes that not only is there no evidence of any orders to destroy classical texts in anything like the Theodosian Code, but that we know that these works continued to be copied and studied by the very Christian monks Grayling scorns.

Grayling then interjects forcefully, saying that this happened “much later on” and tries to claim that these works only survived thanks to Muslim scholars. Holland notes, correctly, that these Muslim scholars were working from copies preserved by Byzantine and Nestorian monks working in the lands conquered by the Muslims, which Grayling tries to simply wave away with a fumbled memory some “Muslim caliph” who ordered the Greek works be translated. But his stumbling reply cannot get around the fact that Holland keeps hammering – the texts they worked from did not fall from the skies or were not found in a hidden cache from pre-Christian times. They were preserved by the Byzantine and Nestorian scholars who had been copying them and studying them for centuries. Holland is right and Grayling is simply totally and grotesquely wrong.

Grayling then plays a shifty game of referring, correctly, to the great loss of Greek learning in the Latin west in the early Middle Ages and then trying to pretend this was also the case in the Greek and Syriac east. Holland does not let him get away with this and Grayling simply responds by getting snooty. I must say by this stage Holland was exhibiting a degree of very English restraint and good manners – if I had been there Grayling would have received a heavy dose of blistering Australian forthrightness and obscenity.

But he bumbles on. Grayling tells us the dramatic bedtime story of bad, wicked Justinian, who “closed the Academy of Plato” in Athens and shut down all the ancient schools of learning in 529 AD, plunging us into a terrible dark age. He seems very fond of this story, since he invokes it twice and gets quite exercised each time he mentions it. And it is a great story. The only problem is … it is nonsense.

As I have detailed before, there was no Empire-wide closing of schools of wisdom in 529. As Edward J. Watts shows in his excellent article on the subject (see “Justinian, Malalas and the End of Athenian Philosophical Teaching in A.D. 529”, The Journal of Roman Studies, 94, 2004, pp. 168-182), Justinian simply withdrew state funding of schools run by pagans. Pagan teachers could and did continue to teach. And Christian teachers continued to teach the classics and the philosophy that had always been the curriculum of Roman learning. There was no “closing of the western mind”.

Grayling is also labouring under the misconception that the Academy in Athens that shut up shop when its state funding was withdrawn by Justinian’s edict was the one established by Plato 900 years earlier. After all, this makes for a much more sensational and dramatic story. But, yet again, the esteemed master of the New College of the Humanities has completely bungled things. Plato’s original Academy was shut down back in 86 BC when the Roman general Sulla laid waste to Athens. The Academy that closed itself down in 529 was a much later institution set up in the early fifth century AD. And it was a small group of Iamblichan neo-Platonists who practised thaumaturgical magic and held strange mystical views that Plato would have found rather bizarre – it simply was not the centre of venerable ancient wisdom Grayling fondly imagines. The “history” Grayling invokes is consistently garbled myth.

There is much, much more that Grayling gets badly wrong and Christian writer Esther O’Reilly has written an amusing article on the Unbelievable website, skewering him further. Yet again, a wilfully ignorant atheist, spouting dusty eighteenth century myths about history, has let himself open to wry ridicule by Christians because he gets things hopelessly wrong. When are my fellow atheists going to stop doing this?

Provocation and Reflection

I noted at the beginning of this review that Holland’s Dominion is the best kind of book – one that provokes thought and changes perspectives. It is not necessary to agree with every point or accept every argument in such a book for it to be this kind of good work. After all, I was not wholly convinced that the Christian concept of reformatio, reformation or revolution was as radical a departure from earlier revolutions as Holland claims. Holland argues that things like Augustus’ hijacking of the Roman Republic was presented more as a re-establishment of former, traditional governance (even though it was not) and so was not really a revolution per se. But this is undercut by the fact that the medieval reformatio and the Protestant Reformation were also presented as a return to earlier, purer forms of the Church. I am also still in two minds about Holland’s arguments regarding sexual mores and the shift in ancient attitudes to what we call homosexuality.

But I feel the sign of a good book is that it is one that stays in the mind after it is read and shapes the way you read and see what comes afterwards. Since finishing Dominion I keep finding its arguments coming back to me as I watch the news, read the paper, listen to friends or read other history books. Few books have the weight of influence to do this, and that this one does so is a testament to its profound significance. That is no small feat for a popular history writer.