I just finished this historian's thesis and I must say, its intriguing! Its premise is that Western culture has been in a "fishbowl" of Christian thought for nearly two thousand years, regardless of our traditional or belief. From civil rights, equality, to ideas of justice, according to Holland, it can theoretically be traced back to the writings of the Gospels and Paul's letters. Holland goes from the pre-Christian lives of the Romans/Greeks, to the present day. It is enlightening. If you are a student of history, its a page-turner in my opinion. ( )

Christian values permeate the western world

Holland brilliantly demonstrates that westerners overwhelmingly hold to, or assume values as universal that are historically rooted in Christianity. This is true for the atheist as much as the Christian. ( )

Holland presents a view of history that emphasizes the impact that has been made by Christianity. The result is a history that sees a Christian influence in culture that goes beyond its impact on morals and ethics. ( )

The first half of this book is superb and meticulously researched. It sets the stage for the emergence of Christianity in the Roman/Judean world and makes the case that the teachings of Jesus Christ and his disciples were a moral and philosophical revolution. It tracks the development of the church and the writings that eventually became biblical canon and reveals how the peculiarities of that process, combined with Christian morality created the intellectual framework for much of what we take for granted in the West: secularism, humanism, philanthropy, communism, even atheism, and western science. All of that is argued very well and has changed how I see the world.

Somewhere around the middle of the book things start to go wrong. Instead of framing medieval Catholicism's devolution into inquisitions, witch hunts, genocide, etc... as a degradation of the Christian moral concepts he has worked so hard to lay out, they are presented as part of that tradition. So are the Church's internal reform efforts and the Protestant reformation. That starts a pattern of pointing to both sides of every historical development (capitalism and communism, humanism and fascism, slavery and abolitionism, etc...) and showing how each exists within Christianity's unique moral framework. Some cases are stronger than others and, after hundreds of pages, the line between unique Christian morality and old fashioned human nature blurs. Worse, with each new chapter, less scholarly effort goes into the assertions. The 'Great Game' colonization of Africa gets a paragraph and then a retouch later. He attributes monogamous marriage to Christianity by just declaring it, certainly news to Jews who've been practicing it since 1,000 BC.

Then it gets weird. The Beatles and 'Live-Aid' concerts get a whole chapter. He conveys World War II through the lens of the Lord of The Rings. Mercifully, Mr. Holland spares us his take on Marvel's Cinematic Universe... Then you realize that the book was published in 2020 and so... there has to be Harvey Weinstein, Victor Orban, etc... What started as a fantastic scholarly work, a classic, ends up taking about Trump's Access Hollywood tape. ( )

Once again, my kind of book. A sweeping and thought-provoking history that could lead to further reading. For example, after a lifetime of reading, I was familiar with most of the episodes and - shall we say - 'characters'. However, I was unaware of the importance and centrality of St. Paul. So, there you go. Recommend. ( )

I was really looking forward to a work that could explain how the idiosyncrasies of Christianity have consciously and unconsciously shaped contemporary Western thought. That's not what this book does. Its central conceit is to claim many of the great intellectual advances of history for Christianity. My knowledge of antiquity is such that I had to give Holland the benefit of the doubt regarding times where my scholarship is patchy. The closer it moved to the present, however, the more suspicious I got. There's a lot of intellectual sleight of hand, running along the lines, if a great thing happened and Christians were adjacent to it, then that counts as a great Christian achievement. It becomes quite ludicrous at the end, including making an argument for GW Bush as a great Christian statesmen, shocked and affronted by the brutality of the Islamic world. This is a long-winded, lazy apologia for Christianity. It may preach to its choir, but for any serious-minded and skeptical reader it should have the opposite of its intended effect. ( )

The scholarship is astonishing. I'm enjoying reading and learning things about the Classical world that I hadn't known. ( )

My knowledge of ancient time is small so I found there was a lot of information to take in. It seems that the original christian message has been twisted all through history and used as an excuse to perpetrate atrocities. A long read covering a big topic. ( )

This might be better subtitled "The Contribution of Christianity to the History Of Ideas" rather than "The Making Of The Western Mind", Western being a pretty nebulous construct and at no time after Luther were any of these ideas held universally. Still, as such its a good introduction to some of the main strands of ancient philosophical thoughts, the profound revolution of Christianity, and the later development of those ideas.

As always though, Holland writes as though he has his eye on a TV series. Each chapter is place and time stamped, and one can imagine Holland, Kenneth Clark style, declaiming "I am standing outside on of the most magnificent achievements of the medieval world......." In fact updating Clark's Civilisation seems to be one of the goals here.

And Holland is a good and thorough narrator. It's just that he has an irritating (to me) habit of applying modern metaphors for ancient thought. I realise he is trying to bridge the gap, a gap abridged for the most part successfully in most of his other work, between scholarly and popular history, but for me he veers to often to the popular this time. Especially in his discussion of modern phenomena. Irritation with some of this meant it took me far longer to read this than I had hoped or planned and at times I flirted with abandoning it. I am glad ultimately that I didn't, but it wasn't a wholly satisfactory experience ( )

The best book of History that I have read in the last ten years (at least). @holland_tom, thank you for your wonderful book! Now I want to read all of his other books. ( )

There is a popular narrative that casts the rise of Christianity as a major step backward for civilization, the negative effects of which only began to be negated with the coming of the Enlightenment.

Many, if not most, serious scholars reject this simplistic view of history. In his book “Dominion”, Tom Holland (not THAT Tom Holland) goes a step further, and demonstrates how most of the positive developments of the last two thousand years have their roots in Christian theology and the practical outworking thereof.

Holland sees many developments as positive which I do not, but it is helpful to see that even social movements which are openly hostile to Christianity owe their success to the existence of a Christian worldview.

Despite a smattering of strong language (mostly in the context of discussing the sexual revolution) I highly recommend this book.

See more book reviews from me here: www.andrewcomings.com ( )

A collection of vignettes of the history of Christianity and Greek philosophy before it, so episodic that you would think it was made for a television series. Many quite obscure religious thinkers. The author's thesis is that the Enlightenment and its developments (the concept of religion, the concept of the secular, respect for science, human rights, anti-racism, anti-homophobia, etc.) all have a Christian origin even when (as with Marx and many people today) they have abandoned Christianity as such. This is certainly true, but exactly what does it prove? In a comprehensive history of Christianity, how prominent a place would this phenomenon occupy? There is a total absence of social and economic history which might serve to explain why these particular aspects of Christianity came to the fore. There is a total absence of analysis of other religions to examine whether these concepts were immanent in these also and, given a different history of the world, might have developed similarly.

(1) Beginning of capital letters and the question mark (211) ( )