Law is like theology.

It’s about interpretation, but at more than just a textual level. Theology is greater than mere wrangling over obscure or difficult passages in the Bible – it concerns the nature of their source and determining God’s plan. So too does the study of law extend to the ontology of the concept and its ultimate end, whether fixed and finite or teleological.

As the legal profession fills its ranks with only the correctly ordained, so the Church constructed its known globe-spanning apparatus of the clergy. The law’s ritual, ceremony and special language all evoke an elevated realm, separate from daily life, just as the Church’s practices serve to demarcate it from the secular.

I began to have these thoughts as I was studying jurisprudence and as I reflected on the claims of legal positivism. The positivists in one sense hold no illusions about the law and aim to demystify and clarify the social phenomenon. Try as they might, though, they cannot escape dealing with the question of a first cause.

Unlike his sceptical teacher, Jeremy Bentham, John Austin was a devout Christian who tried to square his predecessor’s utilitarian worldview with the Bible’s teachings. In many respects, he was trying to unite two largely incompatible philosophies, but he did hit upon a more profound truth than is perhaps appreciated these days – that Divine Law is, for the most part, posited. Just as black letter lawyers stick to scripture, so do Christians and Jews live by the Book. This is an aspect of the Abrahamic faiths that Tom Holland expounds on in the early part of his newest volume entitled Dominion: the making of the Western mind. Integral to the Christian worldview is the value of the Word as a source of knowledge above epiphenomena; it is a distinguishing feature that separates it from Greek and Roman culture.

Holland admits that it is more fashionable to go searching for Western civilisation among the ruins of Athens and Rome. Was it not the Greeks who invented democracy, drama and philosophy? Surely Roman administration, architecture and empire-building are the cornerstones of European culture? Well, in the course of the first section of his book he sets out to challenge these narratives and show how almost all of them have taken on distinctly Christian casts. Take democracy – it is well known that Athens’s people power was limited to those who qualified as citizens – male, propertied, taxpayers. Christianity’s democracy in this regard is much more radical, certainly in the spiritual realm – man or woman, all are equal before God; the first shall be last – no minimum entry requirements here regarding wealth or status. Everyone is a citizen in the kingdom of heaven.

While the contractarian thinking of the Old Testament was difficult to shake off and Christians did see themselves, by and large, as a chosen people, they did not conceive of this in the sense of literal genetic bonds. With the coming of Christ, the terms of the covenant had changed forever. Unshackled from particularism, the message could be spread across the known world and St Paul could become all things to all men.

The middle ages were the height of the Church’s universalism; the European continent was simply known by the tag of Christendom. Of course, now the Church’s all-encompassing embrace had ossified into a monoculture – the age of missions to the pagan reaches of Celtic Britain, Norse Scandinavia and Woden-worshipping Saxony was over and the demand for conformity took its place. Where the Jews of Europe had largely been left unbothered up until this point, when the woes of plague war and famine visited the realms of medieval monarchs, the religious outsiders were blamed and expelled or marked out for special treatment. Thus, the persecuting society was born alongside the clamping down on “sodomites” of stripes and the driving out of heresy. Disappointed in its world-conquering expansionist ambitions by defeat at the hands of the “Saracens” in Palestine, the papacy turned inward and launched the abysmal atrocity of the Albigensian Crusade. Genocidal violence was sanctified by the Church in excising the cancerous Cathar heresy from Iberia and southern France in the early 13^th century.

What had once been a civilising force promoting tolerance and brotherly love began to cannibalise itself. A consequence of the Church’s remarkable success in cultural dominance and majoritarianism was that it had to distort the understandings of the fringe figures whose sheer force of will had brought Christ to the masses to fit lay believers’ daily lives. Central to the problem was the former’s enthusiastic embrace of celibacy and the latter’s instinct to propagate the human race. Ancient ideas about sex were yet to face a direct challenge. The Greeks and Romans mostly viewed it as a non-issue – relieving desires like a glass of water relieves thirst. From a Christian perspective, to give a generous reading, sex is sacred and should therefore be valued only in the context of a monogamous union. The body is a temple whose integrity should be protected, but equally, as is the implication worshipped in. Against this was the practice of monks, nuns and hermits whose contempt of the world and mortification of the flesh defied all this. Popular Christianity was then left, in a sense, with the worst of both worlds: the demonisation of extramarital relationships, minimisation or discouragement of pleasure, hyper-valuation of virginity and chastity and suspicion of the sexual.

Then came the Reformation.

The Reformation was a return to the Word away from tradition, process and titanic clashes between spiritual and temporal realms. Modern jurisprudence (since the mid-19^th century) has had its own reformation of sorts in the form of Ronald Dworkin’s interpretivism. He was tired of a form of conceptualising judicial decision making that was stifled by legal custom, forms and clashes between the duty of office and extra-legal factors such as policy and morality. Like Luther’s return to the Bible as a coherent chain novel whose multiple authors, taken together, amount to the single moral vision of a purposeful God, Dworkin saw the sum of all statutes and cases, once legal principles are extracted, as able to determine the outcome of legal decisions 100 per cent of the time. There was no need for the Church as an intermediary, just as there was no need to consider external factors in a compartmentalised self-fulfilling legal universe.

Holland’s attempt to link Christian thinking with modern secularism starts with a look at the Enlightenment. Its Deists, often contemptuous of Christianity’s restrictions on popular freedom and intellectual inquiry, perhaps wittingly, perhaps inadvertently, inherited a framework of monotheism and belief in Providence that was following in familiarly Christian conception of man’s place and value in the universe.

Dismissing the anti-clericalism of the French Revolution as really a continuation of the iconoclasm of the preceding two centuries, Holland starts to falter in his interpretation of modernity. He fails to fully acknowledge that something from outwith Christianity is creeping back into society. The idea, and cherished bourgeois ideal, of meritocracy. It is and was far from a fringe view that the strong deserve to be on top and owe no particular duty to the poor, and thoroughly unchristian.

Following a quick dash through Nietzsche via the medium of Otto Dix, Holland arrives at the 20^th century. I was lucky enough to see some of Dix’s colossal and, frankly horrifying (but in a good way) canvasses in his native Dresden on a day trip through from Leipzig in 2018. They depict suffering, as experienced in the trenches during the First World War, as mechanical, undignified and without any redemptive quality whatsoever. Ironically, however, they employ distinctly devotional imagery. Dix represents a discovery of the abject industrial slaughter machine humanity is capable of mobilising. God is dead […] and we have killed him.

Nietzsche, for Holland, is one of the few figures who doesn’t somehow absorb the hegemony of Christian thinking to understand the world. Ultimately, I believe his is a liberating philosophy with provoking subtleties that don’t lend themselves well to trite synthesis. Holland disagrees, falling into the trap of labelling him as amoral and a gateway drug to Nazism.

A similarly predictable intellectual trope is parroted in his analysis of communism, which he likens to a religious anti-religion, very much the shadow of its antithesis.

Of Holland’s commentary on the 20^th century, the most satisfying section is his spirited defence of Lord of the Rings as an exemplar Christian text without Christianity.

Concluding the text with a foray into the 21^st century, Holland analyses contemporary feminism, the MeToo movement and the culture wars for the vestiges of Christian-oriented intellectual hegemony. Here he ends on a strong point, drawing attention to the ironies of using puritan logic to oppose a supposedly Biblically sanctioned patriarchy. In America, also the “first shall be last” thinking is still going strong in the obsessively hierarchised catalogue of oppression wherein the “privileged” are expected to show deference and “amplify” those on the so-called lower rungs.

Like lawyers, theologians don’t start from nothing – they have the facts of the case in the form of the Old and New Testaments, centuries of tradition and interpretation to consider and they may consult pre- and proto-conceptual sources to shed light on their subject’s end. I believe it’s more than a facetious comparison, and really more of an observation than a critique. More than the methodology, of course, Christianity is deeply infused in our legal system and it may be useful to acknowledge the cultural specificity of our laws when various interest groups make demands for its reform.

Ultimately, I think that Holland’s insider-perspective on the intellectual impact of Christianity on the Western mind is much more useful than a cynical eulogy for the ancient world, which we must not forget was built on the backs of slaves and naked power. For all its contradiction, it is easy to lose sight of Christianity’s radicalism, its revolutionary upending of hierarchy and redistributive, egalitarian dreams.