- The narrative drive English historian Tom Holland builds into this richly magnificent story is gripping. It’s the story of the birth of Christianity and the profound influence it had through the centuries. Holland's prose is very lucid and at times poetic, making the story highly readable and engaging.
- Importantly it’s not a theological treatise, built on faith, but a secular investigation of how and why ideas developed and the profound influence they had. It's a history of thinkers and events.
- Christianity freed Jewish monotheism from its ‘God’s Covenant with Israel’ exclusivity and made it universal. The generous, welcoming embrace of all classes and races made it the most civilising and powerful tradition the world had and has seen. ‘The divine nous, far from lingering in the motionlessness of a chilly perfection, had descended to earth’.
- Holland explores the key influence of Paul, Irenaeus, Origen, Augustine and others: early Christian scholars who defined the ‘canon’, the most representative tracts of the new tradition.
- As the centuries roll on kings of countries and empires convert to Christianity and with their armies conquer pagan and barbarian tribes and unbelievers. Christendom is well and truly established by the end of the first millennium. Ancestral gods and pagan rituals had been conquered. ‘From east to west, from deepest forest to wildest ocean, from the banks of the Volga to the glaciers of Greenland, Christ had come to rule them all’.
- The Middle Ages were intensely problematic. There were wayward moves. Pope Gregory VII (1073) initiated a ‘revolution’: priests had to be celibate to avoid giving in to their natural lusts; kings had no right to confer bishoprics; the church had to be freed from the state. ‘A model of reformatio had triumphed...The Latin West had been given its primal taste of revolution’.
- The articulation of ‘Natural Law’ was a milestone - all equal before the law, regardless of rank, wealth, lineage. The poor had an entitlement to the necessities of life. It was a human right’.
- Philosopher Peter Abelard and his insistence that 'God’s order' was rational, and governed by rules that mortals could aspire to comprehend fostered the establishment of independent universities in Paris, Oxford, and many other places across Christendom.
- The rediscovery of Aristotle in the early 1200s and the work of reconciling his philosophy with Christian doctrine was a major contribution by Thomas Aquinas. Unfortunately Aristotle’s belief in female inferiority became very influential. ‘The female is, as it were, an inadequate male’. Aquinas struggled with this, as it was contrary to Genesis. In his mind both sexes had been divinely crafted for precise and specific but equal purposes.
- Regarding marriage and homosexuality, Gregory was adamant: amidst fear of plagues cities needed cleansing of ‘sodomy’.
- In 1517 Martin Luther emerges and the Reformation begins. Luther objected to the institutional church governed by clerics and canon law.
- Global expansion of Christianity begins - to the Americas and China.
- Holland tells the story and ultimate tragedy of Galileo Galilei superbly well. Galileo's new ‘lens’ to observe the heavens was becoming a sensation in scholarly circles. He hated Aristotle and ‘the potbellied theologians who locate the limits of human genius in his writings’. His and Copernicus’ theory of heliocentrism was judged however by the newly established Inquisition as ‘foolish and absurd in philosophy’, so the most celebrated natural philosopher in the world spent the remaining nine years of his life under house arrest.
- We then move forward to the beginnings of Modernism: Spinoza, sceptical of Christianity, contended that ‘a close reading of scripture would demonstrate it to have been of human rather than divine origin’. He advocated the primacy of reason not faith.
- The 'Enlightenment' movement was becoming highly influential. Voltaire’s anti-Christian writings in particular. '...the Christian sect’s...bigotry and intolerance had served to ‘cover the earth with corpses’ '. The French Revolution followed. To be free from the Middle Ages was liberating. ‘...a lost millennium, in which any hint of enlightenment had at once been snuffed out by monkish, book-burning fanatics. It was an inheritance from the canon lawyers of the Middle Ages’. But ‘the brotherhood of many proved a fantasy. There was only one timeless language: the language of power’.
- The growing demand for the abolition of slavery, however, remained. ‘Increasingly, it was in the language of human rights that Europe would proclaim its values to the world.’
- And key thinkers kept emerging: Charles Darwin: removed theology from the natural world; German psychiatrist Richard von Kraft-Ebing explored homosexuality: ‘...should be regarded not as a sin, but as something very different: an immutable condition....homosexuals deserved to be treated with generosity and compassion’. Karl Marx: ‘...discovered the law of evolution as it applies to human history...For a self-professed materialist, he was oddly prone to seeing the world as the Church Fathers had once done: as a battleground between cosmic forces of good and evil’; Friedrich Nietzsche: ‘Do we not smell the divine putrefaction? - for even gods putrefy! God is dead’. But beliefs in the dignity of man and the dignity of labour - these were Christian through and through.
- In the 20th century Fascism emerged - Hitler and Mussolini: ‘There was no place in this vision of the future for the mewling feebleness of Christianity’. Their fierce reaction to Christianity was testament to its power and influence.
- And colonisation of Africa and other key parts of the globe: ‘...the confidence that had enabled Europeans to believe themselves superior to those they were displacing was derived from Christianity’. Ironically however it was Christianity that ‘had provided the colonised and the enslaved with their surest voice’.
- Holland's closing chapters bring us to the late 20th and early 21st centuries: Bush; Iraq; Islamic terrorism; ISIS; the passions around Angela Merkel and the wave of Islamic immigrants to Europe in 2015; Charlie Hebdo and its definition of itself as ‘laicise, joyful and atheist’. ‘To trample on superstition was to lay claim to the light’.
- Dominion is a rewarding and engaging history of an immensely powerful tradition that has profoundly shaped our world.
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