Domination : the fall of the Roman empire and the rise of Christianity. By Alice Roberts. Simon and Schuster, 2025. ISBN 9781398510081
In the foreword of this book, the author explains that she became interested in ‘whether we can trace the spread of ideas and beliefs through changes in material culture’ and also how did ‘Christianity reach the West’ and become a dominant idea over such a wide region from its western Asian origins. Her account rebuts any idea that evangelist saints spread the religion solely through their faith or the inherent correctness of their ideas.
As she notes, she had to check herself from thinking about Christianity as an ‘it’ as if it had agency, but instead ‘who had spread this religion. Who, how and why?’ Throughout the book she repeatedly corrects herself, and although she never expressly describes her method as materialist, nevertheless, she does give a clearly materialist account of how real individuals in concrete situations found that what they perceived as their best interests was to produce, reproduce, spread and adhere to the ideas of what is now known as Christianity.
Possibly this book was intended as a treatment or idea for a television series, as it follows the format typical of modern history series, moving from one location to another, in this case from South Wales, to Brittany, to Rome and eventually to Constantinople (although her account does not stretch as far back as the foundation of Christianity itself in the Levant). The reader can picture her striding determinedly past ruins and archaeological digs, and in musty museums looking at the artefacts she discusses.
Accompanying that is a bit of showmanship as she purports to be ‘astonished’ by what she found, as if uncovering some ancient mystery Scooby Doo style. Her claim is that Christianity never was an anti-establishment religion, and that, indeed, its spread was very establishment indeed.
She begins with the evangelist saints who came to post-Roman Britain. She notes that Christianity had already been here as part of Roman culture, and many of these saints were members of elites who had what amounted to a traditional Roman education. The very prominence of these saints was connected with the relative power of churches, places of pilgrimage and the peoples associated with them.
As she notes, in the collapsing Roman Empire, wealthy and powerful families sought to protect their interests by sending sons off for education, and then ensuring their placement as bishops in the church, with the command of land, money and status that brought. This came about, in part, because of the charitable role that the church established for itself as it grew in Rome, supporting widows and orphans; and also providing some of the civil bureaucracy of running regional centres within the empire. As a part of this, the church obtained incentives through tax breaks.
The church had grown within a small and mobile professional class, as it spread through the Roman world. It was never a majority in that world, but plague and financial stresses on the empire may have helped it grow, with its institutionalised resilience alongside its doctrines of salvation and life eternal. It became, as she says, a business of charity.
It was Constantine, an emperor proclaimed in York, who further institutionalised Christianity by making it the official religion of the empire. Roberts doesn’t resolve whether Constantine was a Christian by conviction, but she does note how his rhetoric shifted as he defeated his rivals within the empire, adopting Sun cults and eventually Christian attributes in a traditional imperial display of divine favour for his rule. The suggestion seems to be that, as he consolidated his power, it became useful to tap into the institutionalised networks of Christianity.
To that end, he convened the Council of Nicea, which organised and collated the doctrines of the previously dispersed and differing (and thus bickering) Christian communities, to make a single doctrine and a state religion. As Roberts notes, the fine hair-splitting about whether Jesus existed before his birth, or was of one being with God, became a means of organising factional fights within the Church, which could spill into civil disorder, as it had in Alexandria. Obviously, the idea of one god over everyone appealed to the one emperor of such a diverse and far-flung empire.
In her final analysis, she contends that ‘in a very real way, the Empire became the Church’. The church then became the way that the empire survived its collapse. This is a very readable cross-discipline account of the way that the church grew and became the thing we know today. The metaphor of a business model that she uses throughout is very useful.
If there are any weaknesses, they may lie in sidelining the ideas. As other authors note, one tool the church used was a command of rhetoric and logic: creating effective and plausible arguments would have been an advantage: a business model needs a good sales pitch, and some of those doctrinal disputes may well have had a practical effect on the way the pitch landed.
Pik Smeet
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