Rev Andy's Blog

A rollicking ride through Christian history 

A couple of months ago my friend Steve recommended Tom Holland’s book ‘Dominion’.  I read it and was entranced by what I found – a rollicking ride through Christian history.  Every page has some dramatic fact and intriguing insight.

The author

Tom Holland is a well-known historian.  His first passions were the Persian-Greek wars 

c. 479 BCE and the rise and fall of the Roman Republic c. 200 – 0 BCE.  He had abandoned the Christian faith in his teens.   But ten years ago he was at the site of Islamic State’s brutal massacre of  Yazidis at Sinjar.  It dawned on him that what ISIL had done was completely understandable in terms of the values of the ancient Persians, Greeks and Romans, but completely against his own moral values.  ‘That my belief in God had faded over the course of my teenage years did not mean I had ceased to be a Christian… Assumptions I had grown up with… (were) very distinctively of that civilisation’s Christian past).’

The crux

The crux of Holland’s argument comes so near the start of the book that it is easy to miss.  In fact, the first time round I did miss it.  It comes in the Introduction, whose pages are in Roman numerals (i, v, x etc.).  (The book itself starts at page 3 with Xerxes, king of Persia, creating two pontoon bridges across the Hellespont for his invasion of Greece, physically linking Asia and Europe).

The Introduction starts with the construction of a swimming pool on the Esquiline Hill just outside Rome.  No one had built there before because it had been the burial site of the poor, of slaves and condemned criminals.  This was where ‘troublesome slaves were nailed to crosses … like slabs of meat hung from a market stall.’  The overwhelming attitude of all right-thinking Romans was disgust.  In fact, we only have one detailed account of a crucifixion, or rather four accounts of the same one, that of ‘a Jew named Jesus, a wandering preacher from an obscure town named Nazareth… His sufferings were nothing exceptional.  Pain and humiliation and the protracted horror of the most wretched of deaths … were the common lot of multitudes.’

But his body, instead of being thrown into a common grave, was given a reverent entombment.  ‘Altogether more startling – not to say unprecedented – were the stories of what happened next… That Jesus, over the course of the next forty days had appeared to his followers, not was a ghost or a reanimated corpse, but resurrected in a new and glorious form.’  

‘The utter strangeness of all this, for the vast majority of people in the Roman world, did not lie in the notion that a mortal might become divine.’  Heracles did, and Romulus, and in immediate history, Julius Caesar.  ‘But divinity was for the very greatest of the great: for victors, and heroes, and kings… That a man who had himself been crucified might be hailed as a god could not help but be seen by people everywhere across the Roman world as scandalous, obscene, grotesque.’  

And yet, astonishingly, within three centuries the Roman emperor himself had turned Christian.   And even today, according to Richard Dawkins, “we all subscribe to a pretty widespread consensus of what’s right and what’s wrong.” (p. xxvi). It is Tom Holland’s contention that that consensus –‘derives principally from Christian teachings.’  His rollicking ride through Christian history shows how that happened.

Paul 

For me the most brilliant part of Holland’s book is the chapter called ‘Mission’ (pp.62-82)  The worship of the Divine Caesar (when Jesus was about 20 years old) is shown as being literally ‘good news’ to the former Celtic bandits of Galatia.  Then follow a really exciting account of Paul and his theology.

‘The conviction that a crucified criminal might somehow be a part of the one God of Israel … was shocking to Galatian’s as well as Jews.’

‘Paul was preaching a deity who recognised no borders, no divisions … It was trust in God, not a line of descent, that was to distinguish the children of Abraham.’

‘Now, shaking the dust of Galatia from his sandals, he headed westwards, towards the gleaming cities that circled the Aegean:  Ephesus, Thessalonica, Philippi… By the end of his life, it has been estimated he had travelled some ten thousand miles.’

‘By a bitter irony, it was men claiming, like (Paul), to be preaching the gospel of Christ, who now threatened his mission with ruin.  To accept Jesus as Lord, they had been instructing the churches of Galatia, was to accept the law of Moses – in full.’   (Paul) did not pull his punches. “I wish they would go the whole way and castrate themselves!”’In the wake of the great rupture in the affairs of heaven and earth that (Paul) believed himself called to proclaim – “neither circumcision nor the lack of it has any value.”’

Holland goes on to bring to life the gathered congregations in Corinth and Rome, and Paul’s relationships with them.  The picture of Paul, ‘as indomitable as he was charismatic’  is the finest account of him I know.  

And what made St Paul the wellspring of Christian, and Western, moral sensibility was his pregnant sentence, “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female.”  (Galatians 3.18)

The next 1,000 years

In just over 100 pages, Holland brings before us a string of remarkable people and events:

Irenaeus, the first major Christian theologian, had to defend the assertion that Jesus had been truly human, not some super-spiritual sleight-of-hand by the Almighty.

Origen, the great theologian of Alexandria, said “Wherever men have rightly said, no matter who or where, is the property of us Christians.”   

Constantine, the first Christian emperor, was baffled at the quarrelsome nature of Christians: “When all this subtle wrangling of yours is over questions of little or no significance, why worry about harmonising your views?  Why not instead consign your differences to the secret custody of your own minds and thoughts?”  (p.114). The result of the quarrelling was the first general Council of the Church at Nicaea and the Nicene Creed.

Julian and Basil:  one a newly pagan emperor, the other a learned and godly bishop, were both convinced that religion should be serious about helping the poor.  (Where did Julian get that idea from?)

In 632 the emperor Heraclitus ordered that the Jews in Carthage should be forcibly baptised.  But two years later came the Muslim capture of Palestine and Egypt, and in 695 of Carthage itself.  Only the defeat of their army at Poitiers in 732 by Charles Martel saved Europe from a Muslim future.

In 668 a Greek from Tarsus, present day Turkey, came to “an island of the ocean far outside the world” to be Archbishop of Canterbury, andtogether with Hadrian from North Africa to establish a school for Latin and Greek, poetry and astronomy.  But by that time the Muslim conquests meant that ‘the Mediterranean was now a Saracen sea… The world was cut in half.’

In the 8th century the frontiers of Christianity were being expanded north and east. Anglo-Saxon missionaries sought to win their kin on mainland Europe, often at the cost of their lives, but supported by the Frankish kings.  This project among the Saxons was continued with unsparing ferocity by Charlemagne’s soldiers.’Settlement after settlement was wiped out.  Entire populations were deported.’ (p. 192)

At the same time Alcuin, a Northumbrian scholar, established a powerhouse of book-production at the monastery of Tours.  Not only the books of the Bible but also of all the classical authors whom we know today.  And writing in script that for elegance and  clarity has no superior today.  Basically, he saved classical civilisation.

955 was a key date.  The German king Otto completely defeated a vast invasion force of pagan Hungarians, who had terrorised Europe, along with the Vikings snd Saracens, for a century. (p. 198-202).  Twenty years later the Hungarian king accepted baptism.  His son became known as St Stephen.  

And Otto was proclaimed Holy Roman Emperor.

Revolution 

The most original part of Holland’s book for me was the chapter called ‘Revolution’.  Not the American or French or Russian revolution, but the papal revolution of Pope Gregory VII (1015-1085).  Originally named Hildebrand, as a young man ‘he was granted a vision of St Paul shovelling dung out of a Roman monastery.  It had confirmed in him the ambition to sluice the Church clean from every spot of filth.’  This meant that priests should be celibate; there had been twenty years of rioting in Milan with the crowd demanding just this.  It also meant that the traditional practice of new bishops swearing loyalty to the king had to crushed, if necessary by excommunicating and deposing the emperor.  Although he died in exile, his programme lived on, until in 1095 the Pope Urban could rally the whole of Western Christendom to recapture Jerusalem from the Muslims.  In effect the papacy was a new kind of state. 

‘It was clerks with pens, not knights with lances, which were the papacy’s shock troops.’ (p. 220). The process of discovering and categorising hundreds of years of papal decrees and forming them into a body of canon law took till 1150, creating in the process independent universities at Bologna, Paris and Oxford.  What came to dominate canon law was the idea of natural law.  Gratian said, “Enactments, whether ecclesiastical or secular, if they are proved to be contrary to natural law, must be totally excluded.”

Persecution

States by their nature need boundaries and boundaries need to be defended.  The Church had always feared heresy.   Now they began to execute people.  The first burning of a person for heresy took place around 1050.  In 1231 Pope Gregory IX authorised the vile Conrad of Marburg (1180-1233), not only to preach against heresy but to seek it out  – the inquisitio.  ‘So many heretics were burned throughout Germany that their number could not be comprehended.’  But that paled against the horrors perpetrated by the Albigensian crusade in the  south of France, in which the town of Béziers ‘was reduced ‘to a corpse-strewn wreckage in a single afternoon.’ (p. 236-240),

‘A Church that proclaimed itself universal had, it seemed, no response to those who rejected it, save persecution.’  (p.254)

Reformation

Holland’s story of the Protestant Reformation begins in the previous chapter with the confrontation between Luther and Cardinal Cajetan in 1520.  Cajetan was a man of ‘transparent holiness’ and a strong defender of the rights of indigenous natives of South America.  ‘Cajetan aimed to persuade (Luther in a gentle tone of his errors … By the end he was shouting his opponent down.”  (p. 295)

Luther was but one of a series of men who had challenged the mediaeval papacy, often with a radical call to embrace poverty, like Jesus.  In 1173 a wealthy merchant Waldes had been inspired to sell all his possessions, but his followers had suffered continuous persecution by the Church.  The astonishing success of the Hussite revolution in Bohemia in 1420 against the combined forces of Church and Empire was a rallying call.   Luther himself said, “We are all Hussites, and did not realise it.”  (p. 299). 

For Luther it all started with Hildebrand.   “Hell’s brand, the mask of the devil, also called Gregory VII, is the Monster of Monsters, the very first Man of Sin and Son of Perdition.”  The church that he had made was “sheer robbery and violence.” (p.300)

Luther’s passion was directly linked to the grace that had changed his life, as Paul’s had been. “I felt I was altogether born again and had entered paradise itself through op[en gates.”  Brought before the emperor  Charles V at Worms, he was asked  recant, and said, “My conscience is captive to the Word of God.  I cannot and will not retract anything, since it is neither safe nor right to go against conscience.”  ‘Luther, leaving Worms, did so as both a hero and an outlaw.’ (p. 303)

Travelling back to Wittenberg, he was ‘kidnapped’ and kept safe in the castle of Wartburg, where he was thoroughly miserable.  Until, five months later, he started to translate the Bible into German.  He finished the New Testament in eleven weeks.

Then in 1525 came the great Peasants’ Revolt.  It started with thousand of peasants wanting “to hear the gospel and live accordingly.”  It ended with he slaughter of some hundred thousand rebels and the devastation of vast swathes of the empire – a lasting stain on Luther’s reputation.

These were revolutionary times, and reformers did not end with Luther. Thomas Müntzer, Zwingli, John of Leiden and Calvin all carved their own paths.  But the most radical and portentous word was what Luther said at Worms, “It is neither safe nor right to go against conscience.”

Spirit

A hundred years on, at the end of the English Civil War, Gerrard Winstanley, a former cloth-merchant, received a command form the Holy Spirit to establish a radical farming community, called the Diggers.  “I have nothing but what I do receive from a free discovery within.” For those Puritans who had taken up arms against the king in 1642, toleration was the whore of Babylon’s back door’.  It was Oliver Cromwell, the Lord Protector, who decreed that “such as profess faith in God by Jesus Christ shall not be restrained from, but shall be protected in the profession of the faith and the exercise of their religion.”  In 1648 the terrible Thirty Years’ War in Germany finally concluded “a Christian, general and permanent peace”, in which the princes ‘pledged themselves not to force their own religion on their subjects.’   Forty years later Parliament passed the Toleration Act.

Not the End 

This is of course not the end of the story. The next 150 pages cover the vicious attacks on Christendom by the philosophers of the Enlightenment, whether by Voltaire’s motto “Ecrasez  l’infâme” (crush the loathsome thing i.e. the Roman Catholic Church), or by the guillotine of the French Revolution. 

Charles Darwin was unwillingly convinced that his theory of evolution through the survival of the fittest meant that centuries of Christian moral teaching were wrong.  ‘In private conversations he would confess that, because “in our modern civilisation natural selection had no play,” he feared for the future.’

Himmler, the head of Hitler’s SS,  was explicit of how Darwin’s theory of evolution cut at the root of Christian  moral teaching.  Holland summarises his view:  ‘The strong, as science has conclusively demonstrated, had both a duty and an obligation to eliminate the weak.’ (p.460)

If we find that attitude abhorrent, it is because, whatever our beliefs, we are still heirs to two thousand years of Christianity. 

Envoi

There are many themes which Holland includes in his fascinating narrative which are not mentioned here, for example, sex, slavery and socialism.  One particular theme which he omits and would have been ideal to make his case, that of democracy.   

We naturally think that democracy means one adult, one vote.  It is not clear why this should be so.  Up to the 1840’s the right to vote was limited to males with certain property qualifications, i.e. to those with a particular stake in society.  From  1867 various Reform Acts gave more men the right to vote up to 1918 when women were included.  Ther is no greater illustration of St Paul’s dictum, ‘There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female’.

Whether or not you think that Tom Holland has succeeded in making his case, that the Western mind-set and respect for all people spring from Chistianity, the 500 pages of ‘Domminion’ is still a rollicking ride through Christian history.

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