The humanist historian brings objects to life beautifully, but falters when it comes to people and their beliefs
D
omination tells the story of how a tiny local cult became one of the greatest cultural and political forces in history. Alice Roberts puts the case that the Roman empire lived on in a different form in the church.
It is not an original idea – after all the foundation prayer of Christianity says “thy Kingdom come” – but Roberts tells the story from the point of view of individual parishes and even buildings. It’s a revelation, like watching those stop-motion films of how a plant grows and blooms. There’s a section about how a Roman villa might transform into a parish, the long barn providing the footprint, the web of relationships providing the social connection, the very tiles and columns providing the building materials. I can’t think of anyone who writes better about the way objects can speak to us. There’s a passage here describing her joy on grasping what it means that an ordinary-looking clay lamp found in Carlisle is purple on the inside; there’s a beautiful afterword about the history of bells.
The book revolves around the moment that Christianity became a religion of empire – the Council of Nicaea in AD325. Roberts patiently picks away at the mythologising around this key event to figure out how a multitude of competing interests was finally brought together under the umbrella of a particular Christology. She illuminates the way Christianity manages to be both centralised and local. This is still true: a recent Bible Society report shows that if you close a church a third of its congregation will not even try to find another. Truth may be universal, loyalty is parochial.
