Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World
Tom Holland
A "marvelous" (Economist) account of how the Christian Revolution forged the Western imagination. Crucifixion, the Romans believed, was the worst fate imaginable, a punishment reserved for slaves. How astonishing it was, then, that people should have come to believe that one particular victim of crucifixion-an obscure provincial by the name of Jesus-was to be worshipped as a god. more
624 pages, Hardcover
First published Basic Books
4.26
Rating
6548
Ratings
1004
Reviews
Tom Holland
99 books 2383 followers
Tom Holland is an English historian and author. He has written many books, both fiction and non-fiction, on many subjects from vampires to history.Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.
Holland was born near Oxford and brought up in the village of Broadchalke near Salisbury, England. He obtained a double first in English and Latin at Queens' College, Cambridge, and afterwards studied shortly for a PhD at Oxford, taking Lord Byron as his subject, before interrupting the post graduate studies and moving to London.
He has adapted Herodotus, Homer, Thucydides and Virgil for BBC Radio 4. His novels, including Attis and Deliver Us From Evil, mostly have a supernatural and horror element as well as being set in the past. He is also the author of three highly praised works of history, Rubicon, Persian Fire and Millennium.
He is on the committee of the Society of Authors and the Classical Association.
Community reviews
A Theory of Christian CivilisationI have spent the better part of the last 6 months discussing this book with a close friend who happens to be a Catholic priest. I think a summary of that discussion and my conclusion is the best review I can provide. Tom Holland isn’t a Catholic. But I think he wants to be. This is good news, almost gospel-type good news, because he is able to appreciate fully the paradox that is Christianity. more
This is the story of the molding of the Western Mind, and the main point is that the Western mind is, to a large extent, formed by Christianity. So deeply embedded are Christian assumptions in Western thought that we don't even think of them as Christian, we think of them as universal, self-evident, or we try to credit them to the Enlightenment or ancient civilisations. So in many ways, this is the story of Christianity as much as it is of Western thinking. That's more than two thousand years packed into 650 pages. I suspect there must be a great deal left out in such a compression, but I couldn't tell you what. more
Holland's provocative and thought-provoking history of Christianity's intrinsic influence on what we can call "Western thought" is remarkable for its cogency, given the vast sweep of its scope. Every time his narrative seems to be simply rehearsing the history of Christianity, Holland deftly brings it back to his key themes. Over and over again he shows that ideas we consider to be "self-evident" (to use the words of the framers of the US Constitution) are actually nothing of the sort - they are deeply rooted in Christian theology. The idea of fundamental human rights based on the fact that we are all humans and therefore all equal - which we assume almost without thinking - are shown to be based on Christian ideals and utterly alien to pre-Christian cultures like the Persians, Greeks and Romans. Even concepts such as revolutions, reform, championing the poor, the weak and the sick or the coming dawn of a new perfected age are shown to have intrincisally Christian foundations. more
The copy of "Dominion" by author, Tom Holland that was lent to me bears the subtitle 'The Making of the Western Mind' (which is how it appears on Amazon) whereas, at least in Goodreads, it is shown as 'How the Christian Revolution Remade the World'. A sign of the times perhaps, that the publishers decided a subtitle with the word “Christian” in it wasn’t going to sell books. Or perhaps it was the other way around. Whatever the subtitle, "Dominion" stylishly charts the making of society as we know it today, with a breathtaking study that reaches back from 479BC to current day. Holland seamlessly moves from one historical event to the next, each one a link in a 2,500-year-long chain of important steps in the development of mankind. more
Dominion – a selective reading of historyTom Holland’s latest book clocks in at over 500 pages; yet manages to miss out several key points. Ostensibly a history of how Christianity affected the West, we are instead offered Holland’s own selective view of Christianity and the Ancient World. The Pagan emperors of Rome are caricatured as brutal and bloodthirsty while the early Christian emperors get off lightly. For example, a great deal is made of how wicked Nero was for killing his mother and his wife, but there is no mention that the first Christian Emperor Constantine killed both his son and his wife in a similarly brutal fashion, boiling his wife to death. It is therefore no surprise in Holland’s world that caring Christianity with its emphasis on equality triumphs over the Roman aristocracy, despite its little internal spats. more
Here, Holland resists the idea that the modern, post-Enlightenment West is devoid of Christianity; rather, he uses radioactivity as a metaphor to say that Christianity has affected everything, even if we don't realize it. Instead of using this metaphor, the book says that the West swims in Christian waters. Glen Scrivener interviews the author here. Breakpoint interview here. Wilson review here. more
6/10. I have read all of Tom Holland's non-fiction except for 'Dynasty', and have liked and learned something from it all. Not so here: unlike what's written on the cover, this work is not much about the making of the Western mind - at least not in the way that books like 'The Unintended Reformation', 'A Secular Age', and others are. It is a decent, but not first-rate, social history of Christianity in one volume from an agnostic-atheist standpoint, with space constraints leading to superficial coverage and a questionable selection of events to cover vignette-style. Interlaced with this history in its later parts is a very partial analysis of some political religions with Christian roots, bringing to mind Burleigh's 'Earthly Powers' and 'Sacred Causes', which are cited, alongside the parodic unhistory of Chapoutot in 'The Law of the Blood' (see my review op cit) when it comes time to mention the Nazis. more
This is the latest, and probably the most accessible, book in the genre of "Christianity in modernity" - the attempt to uncover how (Western) modernity is radically indebted to the tradition of (Western) Christianity for its values and modes of thinking. Living, as we do, in A Secular Age, it is easy to think such a project silly or partisan - but it is perhaps the greatest coup of such histories that secularism itself, and all the claims to universality and neutrality that come with it, are a conceit; that, implicitly, they reveal the sheer dominion of Christian ideas. The idea that Christianity, the religion (though this, as Holland shows, is a far from neutral term) of the West for a millennium and a half and more, still adhered to by millions in the West, should have had and should continue to have a profound influence on who we are and how we think ought to be prima facie obvious. Yet various ideological movements over the last five hundred years has obscured this. The Renaissance, Reformation, Enlightenment, 19th century and contemporary secular humanism have all either elevated pagan antiquity or denigrated medieval Christendom. more
Tom Holland (not the guy who plays Spider Man. ) has written a few of my favorite works of history, specifically on ancient Sparta and Rome. A couple years back he wrote an article explaining how he realized that, as much as he admired Leonidas or Caesar, he was nothing like them in his own morals or ethics. Whether he liked it or not, his morality was distinctly shaped by Christianity. This book is his effort to demonstrate how the Christian revolution totally shaped our modern world. more
The central thesis of this book devolves into the Goodness Gracious Me sketch about the Indian father. Everyone was Christian. Diderot. Christian. Voltaire. more
Tom Holland, in this lengthy tome, purports to establish that those of us who hold secular, liberal, Enlightenment values are all in fact Christians, whether we realise it or not. The truth, as we shall see, is precisely the reverse: liberalism was not a vehicle for the spread of Christianity; Christianity was a vehicle for the spread of liberalism, which in turn was a vehicle for the spread of utilitarianism, or what we might call sentientism. The claim that some of the Enlightenment thinkers, in a society in which almost everyone was a Christian, were influenced by the ideas of Christians is as mundane as it is obvious. It is a claim, ultimately, about chronology. But Holland—who documents how Christians themselves owed some of their concepts to classical antiquity—would emphatically repudiate the claim that Christianity is nothing but an extension or synthesis of Greco-Roman or Persian culture. more
Tom Holland has a great easy to read writing style, but the argument in this book was . not his finest. The first half that explores the origins of Christian ideas and the growth / making of the Catholic Church is very interesting. Well researched, well told. I found the connections between Persian religious tradition and early Christianity especially compelling. more
Holland explains church history less like a modern observer than like a participant in past events. His historical accuracy lies in expressing the views and sentiments of church leaders as they would likely have put it themselves. In his dramatic account, early Christian heresies such as Gnosticism were disgusting perversions of God’s word. The violent subjugation of pagan religions across Europe was an heroic cleansing of moral depravity. The movement for priestly chastity purified the clergy from the pollution of love for women. more
There are two important ways to show that the “liberal” and “secular” values of human rights would never have come into being without Christianity: you can show that those values are logical extensions of Christianity and not of other worldviews, or you can trace the history of those values and see whether they ever actually arose in non-Christian lands and how they fared in Christian ones. Holland has done both, but the real strength of his book is the historical tour. It’s relentless. It’s well written. It’s persuasive. more
Tom Holland started off writing vampire novels but moved on to non-fiction and has since written an excellent history of the Persian invasion of Greece, several books about the Romans, one about Islam and one about the slow rise of Christian Europe that started around 1000 AD ; in retrospect at least, all his non-fiction books have had a hint of Christian Western European apologetics (some of it is probably well deserved reaction to the excesses of contemporary wokeness) but this book makes it explicit. Dominion is well written and well researched and he does make a lot of effort to include the nasty bits of Christian history, but in the end it IS a work of Christian apologetics, albeit from a modern liberal angle. Tom Holland’s basic thesis is that almost the entire set of “humanist” values modern liberals take for granted (universal human equality and dignity, separation of church and state, care for the weaker sections of society, suspicion of power, privilege and wealth, condemnation of slavery, cruelty and oppression, valorization of the weak and downtrodden, etc) is purely Christian in origin. No other civilization or culture had these values (or at least, foregrounded them in quite the same way as Christianity). For example, while some thinkers have always been unhappy with slavery, the abolition of slavery was a Christian effort through and through. more
DOMINION is a book I've wanted to read for ages, since it came highly recommended and the same author's book MILLENNIUM had been a very good read on a period of medieval history I'm fairly familiar with. DOMINION is less a history of Christianity than it is an argument that there is something exceptional about Christianity and its related traditions: that whether we realise it or not, Christianity is the ultimate origin of ideas such as progress, humanism and human rights, secularism, and the special status of minorities and the underprivileged. It's a very difficult book to review, partly because it covers so much ground and partly because, while there are things in it that I enthusiastically agreed with and loved, there is also much that I argued with, especially in the first half. I don't, for instance, fully agree with Holland's take on the Apostle Paul's relation to the Old Testament law. Many of what I would identify as the book's flaws stem from the fact that Holland is not a believer, but on the other hand I think this makes the book more compelling. more
Ask my three children about why the sky is blue and you will get three answers: Because it is (primary school); something complicated about light wavelengths and refraction (secondary school science); it isn't (GCSE philosophy and ethics). It occurred to me that Tom Holland in this book asks a similar question as to why modern society still seems so rooted in its Christian past. He attempts the middle answer, though at times the other two might be equally good answers. Tom Holland is a greatly accomplished writer who more recently has branched out from his focus on the ancient world to tackle bigger themes - the rise of Islam and now the influence of Christianity on the Western mind. A history of Christianity and a discussion of the "Western Mind" is a tall ask. more
Eine umfangreiche, aber sehr interessant erzählte Weltgeschichte der westlichen Welt anhand des Christentums. Der Autor schafft es die lange Geschichte von der Antike bis zum heutigen Zeitalter nicht träge nachzuerzählen, sondern Verknüpfungen aufzuzeigen wie unser Denken und unsere Werte seit der Vergangenheit geformt und beeinflusst wird. Ich fand auch die zusätzlichen Fotos, Quellen und Vermerke am Endes des Buches hilfreich und unterstützend zu seinen Erzählungen. Manche Stellen fand ich etwas überzogen, da der Autor versucht zu allem einen Hinweis zum Christentum zu finden (es wirkt zu bemüht), aber trotzdem es war ein sehr lehrreiches Buch. ** Dieses Buch wurde mir über NetGalley als E-Book zur Verfügung gestellt **. more
Holland attempts far too much in 600 pages and yet the result is still quite astonishing. One might quibble about some specific points of historical or theological interest (it is a popular history, after all) but here we have a center-left atheist deftly skipping over landmine after landmine of the usual tripe in order to land a devastating series of blows to contemporary multicultural assumptions. Secularism, it turns out, is not a phase of human cultural evolution, or the taming of Religion's baser elements, or a coherent philosophical worldview or even a pragmatic contrivance- Secularism is, as a somewhat scandalized Holland finds, a uniquely Christian heresy. To add insult to injury, each time it tries to escape the bounds of its historical patron, secularism finds itself reverting to the violent barbarism of the ancient pagans. This is a conclusion that won't be new to many believers, but given the source and the framing it really is a bit startling to watch as Holland makes the ascent. more
I should start out by saying I am the choir, I've been making the argument made in Holland's book for years, Christianity is in the air that we breath, the water we drink, we take it for granted and we do so at our peril. What Tom Holland, who it is worth pointing out is not himself a Christian, has done is painstakingly laid out the case that yes indeed, the West owes many (most) of its ideas and morality to its Judeo-Christian roots, it has been influencing the world from its inception and the world we live in today would look much different had it not been for the influence of Christianity. Holland starts at the beginning of the faith and tracks it right up to the year of publication of his book including the scandal involving Harvey Weinstein and the #metoo movement and what Christianity had to do with it. He doesn't shy away from the many stumbles the faith has had but nor does he dwell on those stumbles. This isn't to say the theory is correct, though the case has never before been so powerfully made. more
This is a brilliant book, as many have noted. Holland is a popular historian of the first order and he has mastered vast swathes of church history to such an extent that he is able to pick out not simply ‘les mots justes’ but ‘les scènes justes’ which epitomise an era or major shift. There are times of possible if not probable overreach, especially towards the conclusion, and it’s a moot point whether or not the progression towards what is best about modern society (in his view) is all down to Christianity’s influence or more the ideals of a contemporary, metropolitan, liberal-inclined historian who is rediscovering his faith. And that's totally fine if it is clear that's what it is. Nevertheless, this is a tour de force and is so wonderfully readable. more
Erudite but written in a popular style that the author is known for (and sometimes these aspects clash and some awkwardness ensues but one can easily forgive and forget it), though in some ways it points out the obvious in less ideological style that similar other books (whether pro or against Christianity and its influence today). I think that the early parts that really show the huge difference in outlook we have vs say (what we still consider our cultural ancestors, the Greeks and the pre-Christian Romans) are the strongest parts of the book. After that, the author chooses historical moments he believes illuminate best the evolution of Christianity and while some succeed better, some less so, the book starts having a scattered feel and sometimes bogs down into minutia, sometimes (at least i feel) it forces its interpretation to fit the theme of the book sort of ignoring the time in-between the moments - it is almost like Augustine (4th century) is followed by say Pope Gregory without too much about Justinian's era ( as another and arguably the major weakness of the book is in ignoring Eastern Christianity and forgetting how Constantinople was so much a counterpoise to Rome for 1000 years) for example. Overall, definitely recommended but based on some very enthusiastic reviews (which in hindsight probably reflect the lack of previous exposure to these types of ideas for the respective readers) I expected more. . more
A secular church history. Super long but written in narrative, so it's an easy read. Written by an atheist historian trying to find the roots of our modern human rights- that "all men are created equal, and endowed with an inalienable right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”His troubling findings. They are by no means self-evident. They are not rooted in philosophy; they are only found in Christianity. more
In my teenage years, to use one of the many nice turns of phrase in Tom Holland’s Dominion, ‘like a dimmer switch being turned down I found my belief in God fading. ’ But despite no longer praying or going to church I still saw myself, even in a militant atheist phase, as a small-p protestant. My upbringing shaped me too much to pretend that Christian ideas did not still influence how I saw myself, how I behaved towards others, and the content of my political beliefs. Dominion argues for a radical version of this self-perception– that ideas sourced from Christianity are everywhere in the West, ‘like dust particles so fine as to be invisible to the naked eye’. Western atheists who never step foot in a church think within a conceptual framework Christians created. more
This book thoroughly reviews the last 2000yrs of western history, particularly looking at how Christianity impacted it. He makes the compelling case that much of what we take to be self-evident today truely is the result of Jesus’ life, teaching, death and resurrection. From finding equal value in all people, to standing up for the oppressed, to providing welfare/charity to the poor, to the formation of our intellectual tools of reason and science. So often the tools used rightly to critique the failings of Christians/the Church are in fact tools that come from and are based on Jesus himself. A long book, but rewarding to finish - I found the last third by far the best, mostly because I find modern history more interesting than ancient history. more
Sweeping and engrossing history – which combines Holland’s trademark storytelling version of history with a strongly opinionated view on the extent to which Christian views have influenced the world. more
I love history. This is some work, charting the course and effects of Christianity over two millennia. The broad sweep of analysis is masterful, setting up each development with a relatively unknown story that unfolds into the stories and characters many will know. Engaging and wonderful. But also, I love Jesus. more
Tom Holland’s thesis is that all Western culture is in the “fishbowl” of a Christian ethics and philosophy. He argues that ideas of justice, equality, civil or individual rights originated from Christian thought. Holland, who is incidentally agnostic towards theism looked at culture from Greek/Roman thought before Christianity, to the Jesus movement in first century Palestine, to the modern age of the Western world. In my opinion, his approach to writing will make one recognize either their love or disdain for antiquity as it is dense yet fascinating. So, if you are an enthusiast of history, you will find this book intriguing. more
Tom Holland made his name as a historian of Greece and Rome but Dominion is his masterpiece. I have some quibbles with him here and there but Holland’s doorstop of a book is remarkably thrilling to read and his argument is, I think, undeniable. Anyone who wants to understand Western values and their origins should read this book. Anyone who thinks they understand Christianity, whether they look at it in a positive or negative light, should read it too. Bravo, Mr. more
This is easily the worst book Holland has written; each chapter begins with increasingly grating, florid prose that lacks references mainly because it likely only ever occurred in the mind of the author. The central argument is weak; the cases covered are cherry picked, and most arguments are utterly unconvincing. Indeed the focus is less on relevant examples, and rather more on Holland's personal interests, the end result being a strange intellectual autobiography of sorts. more