FINISHED READING - Domination by Alice Roberts

 

One of the pivotal moments in the history of Western Civilisation was when the Roman Empire crumbled. They'd ruled Britain for nearly four hundred years. After their departure there is a period where documentation, and archeological information becomes sparse. What was really happening in this period, has been subject to a constant flow of theory and conjecture. What does clearly happen is the remarkable rise to dominance of Christianity. In Domination, Alice Roberts gives her riposte to Tom Holland's much more Christian friendly book Dominion. In the process she gives St Paul a slanderous makeover and the Christian approach to charity fundraising gets a good drubbing. Christianity as portrayed here, is not really a religion, but a scam intent on expanding it's property portfolio, and pressurising the middle classes to cough up more dough. A faith not primarily concerned with capturing hearts and minds, but with greedily grasping for charitable donations and acquisitions.

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Modern historians have to beware of allowing the contemporary hermeneutics of suspicion becoming their default mode. I am not a Christian, nor an apologist for it, but I did find Alice Roberts snarky asides and very 21st century infused cynicism, somewhat irritating. Reducing everything to the machinations of power, wealth and a duplicitous desire for status, to the exclusion of anything else. No one is without mixed motives, and early medieval Christians were undoubtedly as prone to that too. But you can feel through out Domination that she is unwilling to give one jot of credence to the Christian faith itself, and the strength of its religious message in forming and transforming human actions. Its presented as so inherently and allpervadingly craven, corrupt or darkly manipulative. And yet, at the same time it is worth acknowledging that the economic dimension of ecclesiastical history is often quite conveniently overlooked or overlayed with the glittery distracting gloss of faith. In it's desire to highlight the economic underpinnings funding Christianity's rise, this book inverts that and buries spirituality under several truck loads of avarice and baser self serving motivations.

From the moment the apostles left Jerusalem on their mission to convert the gentiles, how this was to be financed became an issue. Many of Jesus's disciples appeared to be humble men of working class origin, who had not the personal resources to fund the proselytising of their faith. The nascent religious movement needed to have wealthy patrons. Paul, along with Matthew, had a profession, he was educated. He came from a well off family, and was notably the only apostle who had Roman citizenship. He could talk the language of trade and money, and find converts through that. Paul's repeated urgings in his letter's for followers to put their money where their faith was, was not him being disingenuous about his own pecuniary needs. Christian outreach work elsewhere, not necessarily by him, needed support.  All this travelling back and forth visiting the major ports of the Eastern Mediterranean was not cheap.

From this practical necessity Christianity gradually embedded itself, and found great profit in the Roman way of doing things. So much so, that by the time of Constantine's conversion, he was attempting to direct control of it. If you take Jesus's approach as portrayed in the Bible as your moral guide, then there was huge amount of rank hypocrisy involved in this getting into bed with the Empire. Jesus healed and taught the poor and needy. Christianity constantly refered back to the humble poverty of those original converts with pride, as if this remained true. The poor are hard to see or hear at all in Roman accounts, what the number of converts amongst the poor was remains conjecture., But the middle class, nobility and soldiers are well documented because they were literate and hence eminently more noticeable. The concept of the wealthy being favoured by god, was a Roman one that Romanised Christianity adopted and promoted,  because it fed their coffers.

There is a lot in this book to recommend it, pulling together disparate information that proves quite fascinating. It also challenges the traditionally held viewpoints of Christian history. She describes vividly the period after the Romans depart, how the remaining nobles who led tribes, did not immediately fully abandon the Roman traditions and ways of administration that were left behind. Their adoption of the Christian faith had been part and parcel of becoming Roman. The elite families in charge, she alleges, remained largely the same, continuing to be in control of secular and religious hierarchies. 

Roberts tends towards quickly dismissing the genuineness of their faith or asceticism, by implying that being Christian to them was like a fashion accessory, an entirely self serving pretense. One that was solely about preserving status, or conferring sainthood upon you upon your death, regardless of a lack of evident spiritual qualities. I don't believe popular veneration of local saints would work, if the latter were truly the case. Local people would surely remember whether someone was saintly or not, they'd probaly met them in person. Leaders of noble families sent their sons and daughters into the monastic life for a variety of reasons, sometimes to provide them with a diverting vocation. One that took them away from secular power and temptation to partake in internecine power struggles for succession within their own family. It wasn't always a strategic extension of a noble families influence, but a way of dispersing and neutralising elements that might become problematic if kept within it. Sure, this was not primarily about depth of faith or devotion, but these cannot have been totally lacking.

Whenever a religion becomes too comfortable a bed fellow with those who exercised political power, both sides are corrupted by the incestuous nature of it. That Christianity was, in the last decades of the Empire a small percentage of the Roman citizenry, but a much more substantial presence within its ruling elites, tells you a lot about how cults can quickly proliferate within small self-contained groups and contexts. Where an Emperor's charisma and exercise of power alone, can create a culture where his advisors all profess to be of a particular faith. Currently how many Republican senators in the US are pretending to be ardently Christian Nationalists, purely for the purposes of career advancement?  Christianity certainly became more prone to extreme authoritarian behaviour through its easier access to power and influence. Intolerant prejudice, oppression and corruption assumed its default mode. And this tendency was present from quite early on, and only grew more hardline as they became the biggest religion in Europe, ruthlessly suppressing and exterminating any religious competition or heresy.

She expends a huge amount of time exploring conflicting evidence for how devout a Christian Emporor Constantine was or wasn't. Its all highly conjectural, and, yes, you couldn't base either a defense nor prosecution on the history Eusebius wrote. The dominant Christian reinterpretation of the Chi-rho symbol undoubtedly happens at sometime subsequent to Constantine's conversion. Though it is far from unusual in the history of Christianity for it to adopt existing symbols and practices if they provided a useful cultural bridge. In fact they became rather adept at that.  It is unclear what reason made Constantine chose the Chi-rho. It's perfectly plausible that he adopted this because it possessed a useful ambiguity.That this was a symbol that appealed to a broad range of people and beliefs. It neither alienated Roman traditionalists nor the Christians, it worked for both.

It is undoubtedly correct to question whether Eusebius created the modern view we hold of Constantine, and the high significance placed upon his conversion experience. How much did we just assume that was how it was, even though it arose out of a Christian hagiographical puff piece. But the interesting thing about hagiography is not necessarily how far it manufactures the truth, but what beliefs and behaviours they are trying to reflect and inculcate via the narrative they're constructing. This book, for me, was outlining a purely economic interpretation to explain Christianity's rise in this period. It appeared to be attempting to construct it's own myth making hagiography. This left me distinctly wary of fully taking on these ideas, wondering what was being left out of the picture she was presenting us with. What contemporary prejudices was this serving, and how much this was objective history or subjective interpolation?  Domination is a useful corrective, but frequently the supercilious self righteous tone of it, annoyed the hell out of me.

CARROT REVIEW - 4/8