Did Christianity make the western mind — or was it the other way round?

Nobody can accuse Tom Holland of shying away from big subjects. Dominion is nothing less than a history of Christianity with an underlying theme. The subtitle says it all. It is dedicated to the idea that Christianity has formed the western mind, not just in its moral and intellectual conventions but in their opposites, such as atheism or the natural sciences.

An argument so paradoxical provokes thought, whether one agrees with it or not. This one is sustained with all the breadth, originality and erudition that we have come to associate with Holland’s writing. The technique is a sort of literary pointillism. An incident, an image, an individual, a place are presented as capturing the spirit of an epoch. They coalesce to form a pattern which Holland presents as revealing the contribution of Christianity to the modern world.

Over the centuries, Christianity has stood for many inconsistent things and for many things which the ‘western mind’ has rejected. It has favoured both peace and war, authority and anarchy, freedom and despotism, individualism and collectivism, often at the same time. It was for centuries a consistent enemy of liberty of conscience, scientific investigation, social and gender equality and unconventional sexuality. These things all reflect its fundamental conservatism, an inevitable feature of a creed that has at its heart a historic revelation of truth based on authority rather than empirical enquiry. So the notion that it has ‘made’ the western mind calls for a rather selective view of both Christianity and the western mind.

What is the essence of Christianity? How many of the beliefs that we associate with it are really no more than the ephemeral social prejudices of people who happened to be Christians? Holland does not in terms answer these questions. But his answers are implicit in his narrative. The essence of Christianity, he suggests, is the nobility of suffering, the moral equality of human beings and the empire of love.