Peter Paul Rubens – The Conversion of St Paul
Dominion or The Making of the Western Mind is the latest in Tom Holland’s series of semi narrative histories. As in Persian Fire and In the Shadow of the Sword the focus is on the broad sweep of history, the development of civilisations.
Holland begins with monotheism in the ancient world, acknowledging the tremendous influence of Paul in shaping Christian ideas. He writes about the influence of Rome, and its decline. He writes about Irish monks, Bede, the Cathars, the Reformation, the enlightenment, and finishes with The Beatles All You Need is Love and the #metoo movement of the 2010s: it’s a vast topic. As usual Holland is well informed, and the book is full of details that are fascinating in their own right. Read it just because, once again, he has dug into the past and unearthed nuggets of gold.
Each chapter begins with a story that opens the door to its age. These sections are more like a novel than a non fiction account. Look at this descriptive section from the opening of APOCALYPSE 1420: Tabor, a chapter about the development of apocalyptic interpretations of the plague:
camped out in tents within the half built perimeter walls ..men who had been bloodied in battle …. women with their children in flight from burning villages; tavern keepers from Prague and peasants armed with flails; knights and clerics and labourers and vagrants.
Or the explicitly narrative approach in REFORMATION 1520 Wittenberg:
Sixty days the papacy had given Martin Luther to recant, or else be damned as a heretic. Now, on 10 December the time was up.….
It is this easy to read narrative style that makes the book so accessible to a casual reader like me. Holland takes dramatic images and stories from the history of Christianity, and embellishes the thread of his argument with that drama, and with imagination. Look at this description of Harvey Weinstein:
To visit the Peninsula Beverley Hills was to visit a hotel where guests were treated like gods. Set discreetly behind vine covered walls…he would hold court in a particularly opulent suite on the fourth floor…. surrounded by ice buckets of champagne and plates piled high with lobster.
There’s a narrative dimension to this, but a moral one too. Words are used to evoke a mood, to invite the reader to engage with images that are both vivid and imaginative but at the same time carry moral judgements: champagne, lobster, gods, opulent.
I wonder how much of that Holland made up. Did he go to the hotel, or scour newspaper reports for these telling details? Well there were no newspapers describing Luther’s trembling hand as he held up the papal decree that denounced him, before dropping it into the flames and proclaiming in a ringing voice…
Those descriptions from 1520 Wittenberg don’t come from eye witness accounts. Holland steps into the mind of the Luther, imagines history, and allows the reader to share his dramatic retellings. He brings it to life. That alone makes this book worth reading.
Holland sees Christian history as a cycle, of which Luther’s 39 theses is only one example: reformation is part of the DNA of Christianity. Power corrupts the church on earth, it turns away from God, but the seeds of the establishment’s own destruction are carried in the words of Christ: the humble will inherit the earth, he who is first will be last. Describing this historical series of reformations is the bread and butter of the book.
Holland argues that Paul’s command to listen to the heart, to take heed of the spirit rather than the letter of the law has facilitated reformation, and that the Enlightenment which valued science and knowledge was founded on the individual freedom Paul allowed. Freedom of spirit is the essential quality of the western mind.
Arriving in the modern era Holland contrasts the legalistic puritanism of some Islamic thinkers with the freedoms created by the Christian reliance on the spirit rather than the word. There is a paradox: fixed rules can be overridden or interpreted in the light of conscience, for example in the church’s approach to homosexuality.
Holland’s Persian Fire identified the clash between the Greek and Persian armies at Thermopylae and Marathon as a defining moment. The West avoided conquest by an eastern empire, and this allowed for the development of an independent Rome, and sealed the western mind from eastern influences. Holland concluded Persian Fire by claiming the division between Europe and Asia that followed laid the seeds for the current conflict between Islam and Christianity – the clash of civilisations.
In the Shadow of the Sword examined the development of Islam, its history, culture and relationship with the west.
Dominion takes a similarly vast subject, summarising the influence of Christianity on the development of western ideas. There is a lot of sense in Holland’s arguments, but whether or not you agree with him the book is worth reading for the stories alone.
This is far from an objective history, but it’s an interesting one.
Senior Reader 