The books treated here are concerned with telling largely the same story. We could call this the ‘history of Christianity’ – though, as is clear from their titles, that story is also the story of contemporary western civilization and its values. That Holland and Siedentop are are, at least sympathetic to Christianity, might be assumed from the project of deriving values our society holds dear (e.g. ‘liberalism’) from the Christian faith. Seen, then, from the perspective of Christian apologetic – which is, of course, that of this blog – such books raise the question of the potential of Christian ‘history’ to influence non-believing readers in Christianity’s favour, and even, to nudge them in the direction of faith. If you feel this is rather far-fetched, then consider, for example, the case of human rights, which Christian apologists such as Tim Keller have argued to have no other basis than in Christianity. Such justification as there may be for such claims, I would suggest, can only ultimately come from an understanding of the history of ideas. And that ‘history’ is very evidently what is on offer in these books.
So I propose here to consider, as dispassionately as I can, the likely impact on a sceptic or non-believer of encountering the story of our faith through ‘histories’ such as these. But first, some preliminary remarks as to the nature of these ‘histories’ and what they are offering us.
‘History’?
First, I have placed ‘history’ in inverted commas. Of the three books, only MacCulloch’s purports to be a history in the traditional sense, though the reader of any of them will find themselves reflecting on broadly the same events – at least where the Catholic and Protestant tradition is concerned. (MacCulloch’s book seeks to be more comprehensive, covering Eastern as well as Western Christianity).
Holland is known in the UK for a series of entertaining podcasts on historical topics conducted in collaboration with Dominic Sandbrook, ‘The Rest is History’. The book takes a rather similar form to the podcast. It deals with its material in a series of practically self-standing chapters, each of which focusses on a scene whose date the chapter bears. It pursues the stories of a number of roughly contemporary historical characters and their interactions so as to illuminate the development of religion and society at that point in time. I am reminded of a manner of presentation which the sociologist Richard Sennet terms ‘post-holing’. This involves the historian seeking to capture a movement or trend in a succession of discrete moments, rather as the archaeologist bores down at successive intervals to reveal to the structure of a building. The overall effect might be disjointed, yet it isn’t, because of the way Holland manages to cross-reference themes and characters, almost like a novelist, from one chapter to another, and across the entire book.
The other two books both adopt a more traditional mode of continuous narrative. Siedentop’s narrative is thematically driven by the author’s aim of tracing the birth and development of ‘Western’ values, which the author believes to be synonymous with Christianity. MacCulloch, on the other hand, seeks, in the manner of academic historians, simply to ‘explain’ how events have led one to another, and so, in the course of time, brought Christianity to where it is today. Such an ambition entails a degree of thematic organization, but not the same marshalling of arguments towards a specific explanatory goal.
History of what?
If two of the books (Holland & Siedentop) are not, properly speaking, ‘history’, neither is their stated topic ‘Christianity’. We are concerned, so it would appear, with ‘the Western mind’, and ‘Western liberalism’ – in other words, with the development of something whose scope appears to exceed Christianity itself. Interestingly, the same is much the case in MacCulloch’s study.
There is a certain inevitability about this. If the aim of these authors had been narrowly limited to tracing the development of Christianity itself, it is hard to see how they could have helped going beyond their stated goal. This is because the Christian religion, whatever the decline in practice as represented in the census data, casts an enormous cultural shadow – and it is in practice impossible to say where the reality stops and the shadow begins. We live nowadays, most would agree, in an age of ‘Post-Christianity’. None of our authors treat that Post-Christianity as a reversion to some kind of religious status quo ante – a new paganism (for want of a better word) – or postulate an alternative (i.e. non-Christian) ideational source for Western values. Inevitably, then, Post-Christianity becomes a phase in the history of Christianity itself. As a result, Christianity becomes something our culture seems incapable of thinking beyond.
The result, even in MacCulloch, is an account of Christianity today that seems strangely at odds with its self-perception of being out of tune with the times. Even in a final chapter entitled ‘The Cuture Wars’, MacCulloch has next to nothing to say about the source of such external opposition as Christianity currently encounters. I guess, our author might reasonably object that the history of non-Christianity was never his brief. Still, a chapter on the current state of contemporary Christianity in Europe and America that makes no reference the sense Christians have nowadays of being beleaguered, and counter-cultural, falls short of a adequate account.
What could, in MacCulloch, be considered oversight, becomes, in Holland, deliberate strategy. Every apparent confrontation between Christian and non- or anti-Christian ideation finds itself re-interpreted as an internal dispute between parties both of whose presuppositions go back to Christianity. Thus, Voltaire’s ourspoken attacks on the church reveal a commitment to moral revolution that betrays its fundamentally ‘Christian’ character. The commitment of transgendered activitist to eliminating all forms of discrimination echoes that most fundamental teaching of Christ not to ‘refuse kindness to the persecuted’. And so on. What we see in all such cases, so we are told, is ‘less a war against Christianity than a civil war between Christian factions’, one of which is generally more ready than the other to own its underlying Christian identity. In short, if we were to take Holland at face value, Christianity is a mindset we in the West can no longer think ourselves beyond. No wonder, then, the history of Christianity morphs into that of ‘the Western Mind’.
In Siedentrop, too, a war between apparently opposed forces – here Christianity and secularism – turns out, in reality, to be a ‘civil war’ that only arises because we fail to recognize secularism as the legacy of Christianity, and, instead, allow ourselves to be mislead by fashionable misrepresentations of secularism as characterized by things inconsistent with Christianity such as ‘unbelief, indifference and materialism’.
We can now address our principle question.
Does the ‘history of Christianity’ have any role in apologetic?
If we take this on a general and abstract level, the response has to be ‘Yes’. ‘Christian history’ frequently figures, often in a polemical way, in the dialogue between Christianity and its detractors. It does so especially in the arguments of the detractors, to which apologists then struggle to respond. We are concerned here with what the apologist, Francis Spufford, terms ‘a set of (characteristic) failures … generated close in to the unvarying core of the religion. They’re Christianity’s intimate disasters.’ Spufford proceeds to enumerate these as follows: 1. anti-semitism; 2. the glorification of suffering (think of flagellants or oppressed people counselled to gladly tolerate their oppression in imitation of Christ); 3. the use of hell as a means of social control (think of mediaeval church paintings); 4. the kind of triumphalist collusion with power resulting in persecution (think of the Spanish inquisition). This strikes me as a very adequate catalogue.
The problem for the apologist is less that these are indeed distinctive vices of our Christian faith than that they will be presented to us without any regard for the opposite, positive side, of the balance sheet. It’s the unfairness of having one’s personal failures brought unsympathetically to light without consideration for the potentially benign motivation of the projects in which one may have failed.
The standard apologetic reaction to such unfairness is respond in kind by pointing to the pogroms, persecutions, ruthless political manipulations that appear to lie ‘close to the unvarying core’ of the ideological projects of Christianity’s most vociferous enemies. However, the books discussed here indicate a better, if more difficult, way: to attempt a more balanced assessment of Christianity that doesn’t merely disregard the positive.
If unreasonably negative characterizations of Christianity in our culture carry the weight that they do, Holland & Siedentop have their explanation for this, and mobilize their arguments in response. A fundamental contention of both authors is that much of the positive contribution of Christianity has become so integral to our culture that we simply take it for granted, or fail to attribute it correctly. For example, when speaking of the ‘primacy of the individual’, which he regards as a specific legacy of Christianity, Siedentop argues:
We are in danger of taking this …. as something ‘obvious’ or ‘inevitable’, something guaranteed by things outside ourselves, rather than by historical convictions and struggles. Of course, every human has his or her own body and mind. But does this establish that human equality is decreed by nature rather than culture?
Christianity has, they argue, been the victim of its own success. As Holland puts it, ‘So profound has been the impact of Christianity on the development of Western civilisation that it has come to be hidden from view. It is the incomplete revolutions which are remembered; the fate of those which triumph is to be taken for granted.’
This strikes me as particularly likely to be true where such ‘revolutions’ involve socio-religious ideation, and affect that bedrock of commonsense assumptions that channel the course of our everyday thinking.
What is therefore required for a balanced assessment of our cultural indebtedness – to Christianity or any other potential historical influence – is a capacity to distance ourselves from such assumptions, and to regard ourselves, as it were, with fresh eyes. Maybe there is no better way to obtaining those eyes that to allow ourselves to be transported to other, unfamiliar, times and places where different assumptions prevail, in order that, looking back on ourselves from such a vantage point, we may catch a sidelong glance at ourselves as we might appear in the eyes of the cultural other.
This is why both Holland and Siedentop begin with chapters intended in their different ways, to transport us into the ideational worlds of Christianity’s predecessors. The fact that MacCulloch also begins with Christianity’s antecedents, only throws into relief what separates their approach from his. Whereas MacCulloch’s use of the material serves the exclusive purpose of narrative contextualization, with Holland and Siedentop we observe a far more radical intention of challenging such assumptions as readers will be accustomed to consider as pertaining to the universality of humankind, and our authors wish us to see as reflecting our instinctively Christian socio-religious programming.
Benefits of applying novelistic techniques
Holland turns this strategy of defamiliarization into presentational technique. A good example would be his treatment of the confrontation of the worlds of Hellenism and inter-testamental Judaism in the early chapters. He could, like academic historians, simply have narrated the key events marking the transition from independent city states to world empire, and related those events to a shift in the characteristic preoccupations of philosophy separating the world of Plato and Aristotle to that of Posidonius and the stoics. A chapter on Judaism would have followed, or maybe preceded that account, and some general reflections offered as to the gulf between these two cultural universes. Instead, Holland presents us with the imagined thoughts of the Roman general, Pompey, at the height of his career:
Always fight bravely, and be superior to others’. Such was the admonition with which Posidonius sent Pompey on his way. The tag, though, was not his own. It came from the Iliad. As on the battlefield of Troy, so in the new world order forged by Rome – it was only by putting others in the shade that a man most fully became a man. Setting sail at the head of his war fleet, Pompey could reflect with satisfaction upon the perfect elision of his own ambitions and a beneficent providence. All was for the best. The whole world was there to be set in order. The future belonged to the strong.
These imagined thoughts bring together an exemplary life of political action (that of Pompey) with reflections Holland wishes us to see as characteristic of the worldview of Posidonius and Cicero, at the same time hinting at what such a worldview owed, and didn’t owe, to earlier thinkers, and how it had come to make sense in the new Hellenistic/Roman context of world dominion. The relevance of notions like ‘Tyche’ or Stoic providence are thus placed in the context of recent historical developments. But, with the following chapter, we are about to learn more of Pompey’s destination, and the specific circumstances occasioning these reflections. This late-Republican general, so we will discover, is about to capture Jerusalem and enter its sanctuary. He is curious to know what mystery lies concealed in that most holy place where none but the high priest could enter once a year.
An account of a very different cultural world is to follow: that of the Jewish people whose aspirations are so brutally dashed. But the effect of this careful mise-en-scene at the outset of the chapter is to invite us, as it were, to experience the ensuing account of Judaism and its thought world from the perspective of a Posidonius, or a Pompey, and, in a lesser degree, to subject the world of Posidonius and Pompey to the gaze of a contemporary Jew. This is a good example of a technique deployed numerous times throughout the book.
One might, of course, object that this is not ‘history’. After all, who knows what was really going through Pompey’s mind as he entered the sanctuary of the Jewish temple ? But it is a technique well designed to jolt us out of our settled preconceptions. And if the road to a juster appreciation of the sheer diversity of human cultural worlds, and the partiality of our own commonsense assumptions, lies via an awakening to the strangeness of the familiar, then it has much to be said for it.
The apologetic value of these books
On the good side, then, a non-believer might, I suppose, be prompted into a more just and a more positive appreciation of ‘what Christianity has done for us’. Not only do these books (Holland especially) bring a fuller and more informed understanding of certain episodes that tend to figure in the atheist caricature – think for example of Galileo or the Albigensians, both of them interpreted by Holland (though not MacCulloch) in a manner that challenges the stereotype. The utterly revolutionary nature of Christianity, glimpsed, as here, from a perspective unjaded by our secularizing ideology, which so often filters out what it prefers to credit to its own secularism, proves an awe-inspiring thing, as are the characters and achievements of so many of its adherents when we allow ourselves to be be shocked into lowering the defences of our ideologically-induced cynicism.
The problem, from an apologetic perspective, is that there is little in these admirable books to discourage us readers from simply resting on our cultural laurels, secure in the knowledge that our Christian values are unassailable. We are free to appreciate Christianity in the way we might appreciate the Romans, our mediaeval legacy, or the courage of our WW2 pilots. If we did happen to be motivated by these books to go as far as to seek out a church, it would be in the spirit of someone joining the JRR Tolkien Society because they had so much enjoyed the Lord of the Rings! It would, of course, be a good, if surprising, outcome. But, apologetic has traditionally stirred us to the recognition of a personal need in our lives that could go unfilled, or a public battle for the good which could be lost. The whole argument of Siedentop’s book is the battle is over, and of Holland’s that it is unlosable! In some ultimate sense, it is, of course: Christianity has always believed that the victory over evil has been definitively won. Yet, an element of the traditional self-understanding is missing here: namely, any sense that our own lives, individual and collective, are implicated in the process whereby that once-and-for-all victory is actualized in history – as it were, as part of a grand ‘clearing-up operation’, for which our support must be enlisted.
The temptations of hegemonism
Does this problem simply come down to the fundamental difference between history and apologetic, the role of the searcher after of historical truth, and that of the Christian preacher? Or is there a way in which the truth set out in narratives like these ones could actually motivate people to conversion?
In response to these questions, I wish to draw attention to what seems to me a potential weakness in the kind of argument deployed by Holland and Siedentop. And it strikes me as a weakness that not only limits their usefulness for apologetic purposes, but undermines their interpretation of historical events. There is one possibility that neither author seem ready to admit. It is this: that the self-characterization of those involved in the ideational struggles our authors describe might indeed be worth taking seriously – that what our authors characterize as ‘civil war’ between those who own their Christian identity and those that don’t, could, in some cases at least, be more properly, as well as more simply, be described as a conflict between Christianity and some common alternative ideational source capable of reconfiguring the cultural world around itself. Maybe Christianity does, after all, have its religious ‘outside’, even in the West. Yes, Deism may be a watered-down version of Christian theism, and Socialism a secular transform of Christian eschatology. But is it really so impossible that ANY form of Western modernity whatsoever should have escaped the gravitational attraction of its Christian origins?
In this context, I would point, by way of example (as so often in this blog), to an influential book by the cultural critic, Charles Taylor, whose narrative endorses the perception of Christianity as counter-cultural, and explores its basis in terms of the ‘immanent frame’. How is it, he asks in The Secular Age, that people nowadays often find it so much more counter-intuitive to believe in God, than they did in earlier times? His answer: a fundamental paradigm shift from transcendental theism to a view of the sacred as exclusively immanent in the created order, and the development of a form of symbolic practice, in the shape of ‘epiphanic art’, embodying and propagating an ideation entirely consistent with that new paradigm. It is unclear how far Taylor himself would think of this ideation – expressivist individualism – as a ‘religion’ in its own right, rather than just falling away (‘subjective turn’) from the more self-standing religions of the past. But others have developed his thinking in such a direction. If we were to follow them, Taylor has already provided us, in The Secular Age, with a detailed history of the development through the last two or three hundred years of Western culture of this alternative religious perspective.
‘Wars’ and ‘civil wars’ are not always easy to tell apart – especially where these have a cultural and ideological dimension. Think of situation of post WW2 in Eastern Europe, or of the mid-C20th century in the Caribbean and S. America, where in every country the USSR or the democratic West had its partisans, and a struggle pursued at global level had its echo in countless local struggles. So maybe we should not be surprised at how convincing Holland can sound when he seeks to cast every apparent ‘war’ against Christians as a ‘civil war’ between Christians and Christians. Is something like that not what the Soviets used to do when they represented the events in post-WW2 Eastern Europe as a series of purely national ‘liberations’? One could, in either context, perhaps as plausibly, take the opposite course, and tell the story of local struggles as primarily a history of global influence. But the latter would require us to discern global (Russian/American) ideological influence as a common factor linking local struggles – and to do so for the other side as well as our own. The equivalent, in the context of Christian history would involve taking seriously at least the possibility of (a) non-Christian ideation(s) by investigating common ideational themes linking the various cases of anti-Christian opposition, rather than taking each case separately and considering it uniquely from the perspective of the immediate stakes of the local struggle in question.
An understanding of Christianity more centred on ritual and institution?
So, there is a temptation to ‘hegemonism’ at least in Holland and Siedentrop, and a consequent failure to register any sense of an ideational battle in progress in which we should ourselves be engaged.
Is there any way this danger could be countered? On the one hand, the historian might, I suppose, show greater openness to the possibility of there being religious ideation(s) increasingly at work in contemporary society that have ceased to be Christian in any meaningful sense. This might go along with a narrower and more focussed definition of the Christian phenomenon, that would be easier to disambiguate from the mere cultural shadow of something whose reality has now past. Such an approach would help protect that middle-ground of current ‘post-Christian’ belief from automatic resorption into Christian ‘legacy’, and potentially open it up to interpretations and reinterpretations from the perspective of alternative ideational positions. In terms of used in the last paragraph, we would remain open to the possibility of ideational struggles that are both ‘wars’ and ‘civil wars’ at the same time.
Where might one look for such an approach?
The most admirable feature of the books we have been examining is a commitment to what we have termed ‘defamiliarization’. There is one academic discipline for which this has always been an integral element, practically forced on the practitioner by the manner of study that the discipline entails, and sometimes formative of the attitudes those practitioners bring to the world around them. I refer, of course, to social anthropology. I am not surprised to find that commitment in an author like Holland, because there has recently been a very productive cross-fertilization between history and social anthropology, with anthropologists extending their enquiries to the practices of long-gone days, and historians (especially those of ancient civilization) coming to appreciate the centrality of religion and ritual practice in traditional societies.
But if Holland, and, to an extent, Siedentop, recognize the value of de-familiarization, there is another side of the anthropologist’s approach which strikes me as having relatively little influence on their studies, and whose lessons might beneficially be incorporated into future enquiries. The anthropological approach to religion is often characterized by an emphasis on ritual practice and its ideational relation to socio-religious institutions. What might this imply in the case of the history of Christianity? I would suggest a greater focus on church and its sacramental practice, as the vehicle through which ideational belief is reproduced and transmitted. By contrast, all our historians, MacCulloch included, focus strongly, almost exclusively, on ‘belief’. The Christianity represented is, above all, that of the teachings of St. Paul, and its result, a reading of Christian history that could, in my view, be meaningfully characterized as overly Protestant. True, Christianity is indeed, by comparison with pre-existing religious cults and practices, a ‘religion of belief’. But to the extent that aspect receives disproportionate emphasis, we open the door to an understanding of Christianity (as system of belief) that becomes very difficult to contain within any adequate definition. A contrasted approach can be found in the work of Christian liturgiologists like De Lubac, whose preoccupations, for all their apparent narrowness, grasp a symbolic core with widely ramifying outworkings in collective and institutional practice. In this respect, it is the liturgiologists who show a greater affinity with social anthropology.
At all events, I would suggest a greater emphasis on the institution and its characteristic practices could help provide a more circumscribed understanding of what Christianity means today and a more accurate basis for assessing its cultural reach.