Just Finished Reading: Dominion – The Making of the Western Mind by Tom Holland (FP: 2019) [525pp]

I honestly bought this (OK, almost) by accident. I do have a few of his other books in various piles – largely about Ancient Rome – so kind of latched onto the name. I had thought that it was going to be about the development of Enlightenment thinking and how it permeates Western thought but I was wrong. It’s my fault, I freely admit, for not even glancing at the blurb on the back cover until I got home later that day. After reading the blurb I almost took it back to the bookshop and would have asked for a possible refund – but I didn’t.

So, there it was, in danger of collecting dust or turning into coal at the base of a stack of books when I read the previous book of the same name (minus sub-title naturally) and thought that here was an opportunity to get it out of the way. The bonus was, of course, its size as a way to boost my page average towards the target of 350 (still some way to go yet). Anyway – to the book itself…. When I finally read the blurb I found that, rather than being a history of Enlightenment thought, this was a history of Western Christian thought from its inception to the present day. So, not exactly a topic I’m hugely interested in to begin with. After around 50 pages I started occasionally skim reading over early Church history and by 100 pages I was giving thought to simply DNFing it. But I persevered. It did actually get better from the Middle Ages onwards and became readable again so I stopped skimming. I think part of that was the fact that I actually disagreed with a lot of what he was saying – not so much the facts, which I couldn’t really argue with being very much a novice in this area of history, but his implications he was drawing from Christian history. Now, I’d be the first to admit that Atheism wouldn’t exist without Theism. If you have light you’re bound to get shadow and all that. Likewise it’s obvious that Secular society would be meaningless without the idea of Religion. But…. The author’s proposition was that everything in Western culture has a Christian foundation and, therefore, by definition Western culture IS Christian culture. Naturally I disagreed.

The metaphor that immediately sprang to mind – though I’m not exactly sure why – was cooking a bird for Christmas (or Thanksgiving for my American readers). The tough old bird of Western culture has been around for quite a while now and has been slowly simmering under a low light. It has also, for most of the last 2000 years been marinating in a Christian sauce which has, over the last few centuries, been leaking out of a whole in the baking pan until almost all of the sauce has dripped away. Despite the fact that most of the sauce has now disappeared the old bird still tastes of marinade because it’s been basting in it for a long time. But this does not mean that the marinade IS the foundation to the bird. Given another 500 or 1000 years future partakers of the bird might not even be able to discern any flavour of sauce or even detect it with scientific instruments. At that stage is the bird still, fundamentally, a Christian bird?

I am a great believer in antecedents. Christianity did not just ‘pop’ into existence from nowhere. Even the author admits that Greek philosophy had a significant impact on some of the ideas which made it into the final cannon of the Bible. Likewise ideas from Hebrew texts and ideas from further East influenced the thoughts and ideas of the original scribes. So, clearly, the foundations had themselves foundations beneath them and so on – all the way down. Christianity clearly had a significant (even huge) impact on Wester culture due to its pervasiveness and the sheer amount of time it’s been around. But at the same time the idea that our culture is a Christian culture is at the very least debatable if not disputable. Naturally I do not believe that the author made his case here. However, if you do (unlike me!) have an interest in the early Christian church or how Christian ideas affected Western culture that you’ll probably get much more out of this book than I did.

[Side Note: This is only the 7th reviewed book to date published in 2019. So far I have still to review anything published in 2020 or 2021.] 

New High Score (since records began 22nd October 2020)

Average Page Count: 338pp (+2pp)