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Domination tells the story of how a tiny local cult became one of the greatest cultural and political forces in history. Alice Roberts puts the case that the Roman empire lived on in a different form in the church.
It is not an original idea – after all the foundation prayer of Christianity says “thy Kingdom come” – but Roberts tells the story from the point of view of individual parishes and even buildings. It’s a revelation, like watching those stop-motion films of how a plant grows and blooms. There’s a section about how a Roman villa might transform into a parish, the long barn providing the footprint, the web of relationships providing the social connection, the very tiles and columns providing the building materials. I can’t think of anyone who writes better about the way objects can speak to us. There’s a passage here describing her joy on grasping what it means that an ordinary-looking clay lamp found in Carlisle is purple on the inside; there’s a beautiful afterword about the history of bells.
The book revolves around the moment that Christianity became a religion of empire – the Council of Nicaea in AD325. Roberts patiently picks away at the mythologising around this key event to figure out how a multitude of competing interests was finally brought together under the umbrella of a particular Christology. She illuminates the way Christianity manages to be both centralised and local. This is still true: a recent Bible Society report shows that if you close a church a third of its congregation will not even try to find another. Truth may be universal, loyalty is parochial.
The book (according to its YouTube trailer, at least) promises to “lift the veil on secrets that have been hidden in plain sight” and find out who started Christianity and why. It is a humanist take, so you know the who and why is not likely to be Jesus, and the forgiveness of sins. And some of the secrets have been hidden in very plain sight indeed. The fact that Christians served in the Roman army won’t be news to fans of that patron of archers, gay icon, and subject of portraits by Botticelli, El Greco, Mishima, Derek Jarman and Louise Bourgeois: Saint Sebastian. There is a bracingly contrarian takedown of Saint Paul, reframing him as a Trumpian grifter and stupidity advocate. It’s fun but no more lifts the veil on his influence than pointing out that Marie Stopes was a raging eugenicist would lift the veil on the appeal of contraception.
If you’re looking for the open, inquisitive humanism of Erasmus or Ursula K Le Guin, then you’ll have to read them. Prof Roberts’s approach is more brisk. Anyone who thinks the church was about anything “other than money and power”, she says, is suffering from Stockholm syndrome. Illuminators of manuscripts, builders of cathedrals, makers of the objects in which she herself finds such wonder were all either duplicitous or duped. In a splendidly anachronistic closing flourish she shelves the empire metaphor and instead compares the church to a corporation with directors and CEOs, franchises and a product to sell. This – with its implication of top-down control and single unswerving purpose – is queasily close to a conspiracy theory, albeit one that the best bits of this book refute.
There is a lot of disappointed eye-rolling about the things that people believed – or pretended to believe. The trouble with rolling your eyes is that you end up looking in the wrong direction. One example among many: Roberts is dismissive of saints such as Columba and Aidan who chose to live on isolated islands, pointing out that these islands were not that isolated in days when sea was safer than roads. But surely they were choosing to embrace simplicity not just for its own sake but as a kind of protest, a holding to account. Yes, you can more or less see Bamburgh castle from Lindisfarne – but isn’t that the point? That the king in his castle is forced to consider the saint in his cell every time he looks out from the battlements. To protest somewhere truly isolated would be like shouting “fuck the patriarchy” in a penguin colony. Of course from some angles Christianity does looks like a business, but then from many angles a dolphin looks like a fish. It swims, eats and lives like a fish but there’s an important difference. It suckles its young.
Back in 2016, Alice Roberts had a go at a vastly more sacred cow than Christianity. In a piece in Scientific American, she attacked David Attenborough himself for promoting the “aquatic ape hypothesis”, dismissing it as a theory of everything, and like all theories of everything, “both too extravagant and too simple”. I know this because I kept the article on my desk for years. Cynicism is also a theory of everything. If the humanism that frames the narrative here is ever to offer more than eye-rolling, it needs to embrace the fact that, to quote the Alice Roberts of 2016, the reality is “both more complex and more interesting”.
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