Dominion Buchzusammenfassung - das Wichtigste aus Dominion

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Zusammenfassung von Dominion

Name: Dominion
Rating: 4.4 (76 reviews)
Author: Tom Holland

Tom Holland

How the Christian Revolution Remade the World

4.4 (76 Bewertungen)

30 Min.

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Christentum Theologie Alternative Perspektiven Europäische Geschichte

Inhaltsübersicht

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What’s in it for me? A grand, dramatic sweep of how Christianity and the world evolved together.

Whether or not you believe that Jesus was the son of God, Christianity has probably touched your life in some way. This religion has been an incredible force in shaping the world.

These blinks will take you on a journey that begins deep in antiquity, amid the primordial soup of ideas from which Christian values sprung. From there, you’ll pass through the fall of the Roman Empire, the Protestant Reformation, and European colonialism. Your travels will end with the Beatles and Martin Luther King Jr. in the late twentieth century – and you’ll see why Christianity remains relevant through the ages.

In these blinks, you’ll learn

which culture invented the practice of crucifixion;
why Galileo was sentenced to house arrest for his studies of the universe; and
why Hitler changed his mind about Christianity.

Persian, Greek, Roman, and Jewish thought established a world in which Christianity could emerge.

As ancient international relations went, there was no love lost between the Athenians and the Persians. The Athenians viewed the Persians as brutal, bloodthirsty barbarians. They were horrified by Persian methods of execution – in particular, the gruesome practice of crucifixion. A criminal was attached to a stake, with nails driven through his feet and hands, and then he was left to expire while crowds jeered.

The Persian king who sanctioned this type of punishment believed he had a divine mandate to dispense justice. According to the Persian belief system, everyone had a choice. People could choose between truth and lies, darkness and light. It was up to the king to punish those who had chosen unwisely.

The Athenians found this style of politics repellent. In Athens, it was up to every citizen to ensure they didn’t cause offense. According to Aristotle, who was writing in the fourth century BCE, an elegant order cascaded from the mind of a just and universal god. Humans were superior to other species, men were superior to women, and so-called barbarians were only fit to serve the Greeks as enslaved people.

Rome built its power on the foundation of Greek thought. Early Roman philosophers, who became known as the Stoics, believed that heaven’s order was governed by mathematical phenomena. What followed was this: everyone on earth – man, woman, master, or enslaved person – was able to observe these phenomena and, therefore, tell right from wrong.

Further, there was a spark of the divine within everyone. That spark was the conscience.

But one nation that formed part of the Roman empire was peculiar: the Jews. They only worshipped one god, and their relationship with him was personal. With the Ten Commandments, delivered to Moses on Mt. Sinai, God made a pact with the Jews: follow the rules and you might avoid punishment. It’s this covenant that kept the Jewish religion alive.

But for the Jews, too, things were about to change. A dangerous cult had sprung up in the Roman colonies around Jerusalem. Followers of an itinerant named Jesus believed, despite their leader’s hideous crucifixion, that he was the son of God – and that he had risen to heaven after his death.

In the year 19 CE, a Jewish scholar called Paul was passionately dedicated to stamping out this cult. Little did he know that he would soon become one of its apostles.

Paul interpreted Jesus’s story in a way that served as a counterpoint to a faltering Roman society.

Paul was traveling to Damascus when he suddenly saw a blinding light. To him, it could only be one thing: a sign that Jesus was indeed the son of God. Paul would devote the rest of his life to spreading the news despite the danger – and even physical punishment – of promoting a new religion.

The only thing that mattered, Paul wrote time and time again to scholars in cities around the Mediterranean, was love. All you had to do was believe in Christ’s story. This mattered – not being born into the right family or studying in the right schools. Paul argued that by taking on the nature of an enslaved person, and enduring a humiliating, excruciating death, the son of God had shown that anyone could be redeemed.

When the Roman emperor Constantine converted to Christianity, the religion took on the trappings of bureaucracy.

Meanwhile, in Egypt’s ancient Alexandria, Christianity was setting up a worldview through which Jewish and Greek thought were able to mingle. Writing in Greek, the scholar Origen championed Jewish scriptures as the so-called Old Testament, to be enshrined by Christians as well as Jews. Origen also studied a critical question: How could Christians say there was only one God if they also worshipped his son?

The unity of God, he argued, was in a trinity: the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

As Christianity consolidated, Christians began to view others as evil – and reacted with increasing violence.

By the end of the fifth century CE, it was only in the deepest, most remote European countryside that one could find people practicing the old religions. In these pagan religions and cults, as well as increasingly in Judaism, Christians saw darkness and evil. This evil had a face: a new force called Satan.

To stamp out the last vestiges of paganism, monasteries and convents endorsed by the growing power of the Papacy in Rome were founded in the remote reaches of Europe. Men and women flocked to them, attracted by two passions: they wanted to fight evil, and they strived to confess their sins to regain God’s favor.

Under Gregory VII, the Papacy recast itself as the ultimate judge of morality.

The Papacy wanted to consolidate power, and it needed a plan. Pope Gregory VII came up with a scheme that was both sinister and extremely effective. He deemed that heretics, or those suspected of heresy, could be burned alive. His agents got to work – and soon Europeans were put to the fire in extraordinary numbers.

Across Europe, people who witnessed those executions decided it was probably unwise to question the Church.

The fifteenth century brought new challenges to the Papacy – but the Vatican brutally crushed them at every turn.

Many in Europe thought the Papacy itself was in need of reformation. It didn’t seem to be making things on Earth that much better. Plague and war were ravaging the continent, and Ottoman Turks were nipping at Europe’s eastern borders.

Meanwhile, in Spain, an Italian called Christopher Columbus was making a case to Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand. He wanted them to fund his quest: an expedition to discover a shorter route to India. The profits, Columbus promised, would go to a sacred cause – they’d help take Jerusalem from Arab rule. The royals were sold. And, in 1492, Columbus set sail.

The rise of Protestantism sparked violence all over the world, but it also gave rise to a new intellectualism.

By the late sixteenth century, Europe was tearing itself apart.

Thirty years of war in Europe between Protestants and Catholics led to millions of deaths. People wanted to escape the bloodshed, even if that meant hardship and uncertainty. In 1620, a ship called the Mayflower left England and set out for America. Its passengers saw themselves as humanity’s only hope. Their plan was to live purely; they even called themselves Puritans.

In the eighteenth century, Europeans began using Christianity to define their values.

Voltaire dreamed of a brotherhood of man. But his ideas were based in Christian thought, just like almost everything else in French society. To separate France from its Christian roots would require a violent thrust.

It came in 1793, as the sans-culottes – peasants and laborers who’d been ignored by society for centuries – set out to change France forever. Their revolution was anything but peaceful. In their fervor, people who wanted to destroy the old world set upon the basilicas with sledgehammers and smashed statues of saints.

At the turn of the twentieth century, the Christian faith was on increasingly shaky ground.

By the middle of the nineteenth century, the defenders of Christianity had added a new weapon to their arsenal: so-called natural theology. The life cycle of a butterfly, pastors said, was evidence of God’s grace – only divine will, they claimed, could create something that complicated and beautiful.

The argument sounded convincing enough until, in 1860, everything changed. That was the year Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species. Darwin said that human existence – and, indeed, the whole living world – was a product of evolution, not God.

Christian ideas remain relevant to this day.

World War I traumatized the whole of Europe and helped spawn something much, much darker than anything its survivors could have ever imagined. In Germany, a charismatic young politician called Adolf Hitler set up a new movement: National Socialism.

Originally, he said he supported Christian ideas. But by 1933, Hitler began to see Christianity as a challenge to his totalitarian mission. He thought Germans would never fulfill their racial destiny while adhering to Christian compassion.

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Worum geht es in Dominion?

Dominion (2021) is a grandiose look at the impact Christianity has had on the development of the Western mind. From its roots in antiquity to the pop singles of the twentieth century, the story follows the dramatic development of Christian thought over three thousand years.

Wer Dominion lesen sollte

Lovers of broad-sweep history
Those looking for an insouciant take on European history
Anyone who thinks they know what Christianity is all about

Über den Autor

Tom Holland is an award-winning historian and author. His book Rubicon: The Triumph and Tragedy of the Roman Republic won the Hessell-Tiltman Prize for History in 2004, and Persian Fire won the Anglo-Hellenic League’s Runciman Award in 2006.

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