Imagine the course of world history as one long conversation, and each event as an argument within it. God asks a question; man gives his answer. Back and forth it goes, down through the ages, as this conversation becomes more like a journey. There’s a point that the Almighty seems to be driving at. But what? What does man keep missing?
There is a convention in the world of English-speaking historians that I will not be following in this book. It is, I think, a wrong answer to the aforementioned, age-old question. Believing the older AD and BC nomenclature to imply Christian arrogance — and it very well might have; in fact, I think it is likely — many historians have opted to use the question-begging, but at least religiously neutral, terms CE and BCE instead. For all of the wrong reasons, perhaps, the older nomenclature was a more accurate description of what history means, and so you will forgive me for choosing accuracy over sensitivity.
Or maybe you will not. And that is understandable, for this is the question that has continually been repeated since the Age of Christ: Is there anything more important than love? And the objection has always been, But what about the truth?
Tom Holland, in his ground-breaking book, Dominion, persuasively argues that Christianity has so shaped the Western mind, that even when Westerners discredit Christianity because of the crimes done in Christ’s name, they use implicitly Christian arguments to do so. “There is no escape,” says Holland, from the Christian mindset. It has permeated everything in the Western world, that is, until the Nazis. Strangely, weirdly, Nietzsche led the way back into a pre-Christian world of pagan values that so shocked and horrified the world, that Adolph Hitler is still the standard against which all evil is measured, eclipsing even the importance of Jesus Christ in our post-World War II moral reasoning.
In this case, the exception disproves the rule. How, if Christianity had permeated the Western mind so thoroughly that Europe was, in Holland’s words, “separated from what existed before the coming of Christianity by a great cloud of dust particles,” did Nietzsche ever see through it? If it is “almost impossible for us to get back to what Aristotle or Plato meant before the coming of Christianity,” then how did Adolph Hitler and the Nazis manage to “trample on Christian assumptions” in the process?
It is true in one sense and false in another to say, as Holland says in his interview with the Indian webzine, Scroll, that “Europe has had a mono-culture. It’s been Christian. We just don’t have the range of approaches and understandings of god that you have in India. We’re not a land of many gods. For centuries and centuries, we just have the one god.”
Conversion is not a once-and-done process. Constantine’s infamous marching of his soldiers into baptism does not wash away the pagans they were when they marched in. Changing the entire way in which a mind works takes time, accomplished point by point, conviction by conviction, in a process that extends well beyond the lifetime of any one individual. It is picked up and carried on by her children, and her children, on through the generations. And as any parent knows, the children will have objections along the way. They will point out what does not add up in the convictions of their forefathers, and they will make one of two arguments:
- it isn’t true, or
- it isn’t love
As the Scroll interview points out, it is a cop-out for Holland to say that the one very evil idea that Christianity has spawned was not actually very Christian at all. To say that the Nazis blamed Christianity as a “grey breath” that has destroyed what is noble in Germanic man, is not significantly different from the Marxists who blamed Christianity as an “opioid” that clouds the common man’s thought. Nor have the liberals been any kinder to Christianity; hence Holland’s book!
The truth is that each of these three 20th century innovations — nationalism/fascism, liberalism/globalism and socialism/marxism represent three different axes of a pyramid of thought, which itself formed as an answer to the question of love: but what about the truth?
Specifically, what about all that is true, good and beautiful in this world?
This point / counter-point, love / truth, the ideal / the real, is, as another Christian historian, Paul Johnson, pointed out, “the essence of the religious dynamic.” It is the essence of the conversation that all of history has been driving at: how do I live well in this world and the next? How do I live with the kind of radical, extravagant, even wasteful love that inspires people do the very sort of things that make this world a truer, more beautiful and better place?
Do you see the paradox? It never ends, not at least, until we have truly arrived at utopia and found our way back to Eden. For that is where this story truly starts, well before Jesus, and also long after him. It is a story that, in truth, has been repeated over and over stretching back into time immemorial and on up to the present. It has, like Holland’s Christianity, so permeated our story that it was not until Western anthropologists viewed the re-enactment of its drama in the entirely pre-Christian world of the Papuans and Polynesian islanders following World War II that they could see it for what it was.
They called the Polynesians’ religious drama a “cargo-cult,” and in a twist of cultural arrogance, failed to see it as a fundamentally human tendency. We know this world is not all that it could be, and we know that there are a great many things we should do if we would make it so. But they require sacrifice.
It is no accident of history that every one of these movements that has ended in horrible bloodshed and destruction has required sacrifice. That was a feature, not a bug. It is as if we refuse to believe that anything else will ever be effective.
Where Holland sees a Nazi exception to the otherwise Christian norm, I see another twisted attempt to reach it. Nazism was not warmed-over paganism; it was yet another form of, yes Christian, twisted love, no more and no less twisted than Communism or even our own current, Global order.