Domination review: Alice Roberts investigates the unstoppable rise of Christianity

Domination
Alice Roberts (Simon and Schuster)

Alice Roberts’ latest book is a sort of a left turn. In his previous works Crypt And BuriedIt merged expertise into osteoarchaeology – the study of preserved human bones – with more traditional historical approaches, such as the analysis of ancient texts. Technical science was intertwined with empathetic and thoughtful discussions on the historical file it was targeting and has often reached portraits in three nuanced and nuanced dimensions of past human lives and cultures.

In Domination: the fall of the Roman Empire and the rise of Christianity There is practically no osteoarchaeology. The objective is much more on historical documents. It is not a criticism – Roberts is a cautious and curious reader in history – but it could well take some fans by surprise.

The subject of Roberts here is the rise of Christianity of the humble sect of the eastern Mediterranean to a religion with billions of members. How and why did he become dominant, when the most wasomed?

In the center of the story is the Roman Empire. When Christianity emerged, the Empire controlled almost all lands around the Mediterranean, from Great Britain to Syria. The Romans had a lot of gods, but Christianity has gradually become more popular. There are several obvious turns. One was when Constantine I, which reigned from advertising 306 to 337, decriminalizes Christianity (and supposedly converted, but Roberts underlines the gaps in the evidence on this front). Another came when Theodose I, which reigned from AD 379 to 395, made Christianity the state religion.

Roberts is skeptical about traditional explanations on this subject: that the ideas of Christianity were particularly attractive, for example, or that his disciples were more devoted. Such claims, she argues, are hardly more than Christian propaganda.

Instead, Roberts says that the true secret of the success of Christianity is how much he quickly penetrated the upper levels of Roman society. Jesus may have dragged with lepers and sex workers, but the evangelists who followed in his wake targeted Romans in money, soldiers and the educated elite. This recruitment effort managed to do. “The first adopters were, not among the rural, even the urban, poor of the Empire – but among the urban intermediate and upper classes,” writes Roberts.

During the following decades and centuries, the church acquired a portfolio of money companies. As Roberts writes, “take off the religious superposition and what left is a huge sophisticated system of interconnected companies: well-being, health, legal, agro-industry, expedition, education”.

The church has also won many state functions, in particular the charitable efforts for poverty. However, he did it in a way that seems clearly cynical. “Christian Charity”, writes Roberts, “has never been intended to solve the problem of poverty.” Instead, it allowed the church to market itself at all levels of society: “The poor had to be informed that they would harvest awards in paradise. The rich were to say that the only way to reach the sky was to donate to the Church.”

It was a system built on steep social inequalities. We cannot help but compare it to the philanthropy of modern billionaires.

Finally, the entire Roman socioeconomic system has been reorganized around the church, explains Roberts. Elite, educated Romans continued careers of the church, in part because they were lucrative.

When the Western Roman Empire collapsed, this elite has aligned itself with the new regimes but kept the intact system and has often kept their positions. “Whatever rhetoric, whatever the spiritual messages that were published, the entity as a whole looks a lot like Roman affairs, Roman society as usual,” writes Roberts. “The eternal truth is not theological: the gods come and go, the temples go up and descend – but business is always business.”

Domination is a bit difficult at the beginning: there are a lot of names to follow, and the story jumps in space and time. Everything sets up equipment, however, once the Roberts argument is developed. The result is an incisive, provocative and sometimes controversial account of one of the most important organizations in human history.

Michael Marshall is a writer based in Devon, in the United Kingdom,

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