Dominion: The Death on the Cross

~ Clarissa

In the USSR, members of the intelligentsia held all sorts of fascinating conversations. The world was closed off from us. Books worth reading were next to impossible to get. We wanted to know but it was very hard to find sources of knowledge. So we educated each other, shared (in great secrecy, of course) the crumbs of learning that we managed to come across. Truly, you only value knowledge and books as they deserve if you have known or have imagined life where they are not allowed to exist.

I was a child back then but I remember these conversations, always held in tiny Soviet kitchens, well. One that stuck in my memory the most was when a group of my father’s friends were discussing Christianity. My father was a crypto-Christian but his best friend, a well-known academic, didn’t get it.

“What I will never understand,” he said, “is why Christians wear on their necks the symbol of torture and degradation of the founder of their religion.”

Nobody in the group could answer that question but it’s a crucial one. It’s so important that Tom Holland starts his magnificent book Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World with a discussion of precisely this issue. Why was Jesus crucified? Whether you believe Jesus was the son of God or that he was a character invented by a literary genius of 2,000 years ago doesn’t detract from the importance of this question. Why is crucifixion the form of death that was chosen for him? And why is it the cross that we still wear and not the tomb where the resurrection took place or the dove or anything symbolizing what we believe is Jesus’s greatest gift, the victory over death?

Tom Holland explains in Dominion that crucifixion was the most humiliating, horrific, and abject death known to ancient Romans. It was reserved for rebellious slaves, and a decent person would feel tainted even by knowing about it. This is why, says Holland, almost no descriptions of crucifixions have been preserved. Romans were very gabby about their lives and achievements but this is one thing they clearly hated to talk about.

Back in the day, the weirdest thing for people about Jesus’s death and resurrection wasn’t the resurrection. To us today it’s a mega big deal but ancient Romans lived in a reality where the borders between the worlds of humans and spirits were porous. A veritable procession of caesars and great warriors routinely became divinities after their deaths with all sorts of majestic portents and such. It’s not that Jesus came back to life after death and ascended into heaven that was unusual. Rather, what blew people’s minds was that he did all that after being subjected to the most abject and degrading death imaginable that was reserved to the absolute dregs of society. And also that he actually chose to die in that way. People couldn’t get over it. He’s the Son of God, he’s got options, and that’s what he chooses? This absolutely blew up their understanding of the world.

Divinity, then, was for the very greatest of the great: for victors, and heroes, and kings. Its measure was the power to torture one’s enemies, not to suffer it oneself: to nail them to the rocks of a mountain, or to turn them into spiders, or to blind and crucify them after conquering the world. That a man who had himself been crucified might be hailed as a god could not help but be seen by people everywhere across the Roman world as scandalous, obscene, grotesque.

This extraordinary, shocking, unimaginable event laid the foundation of what today we call the Western civilization and made all of us – utterly irrespective of what we profess to believe – profoundly and inescapably Christian. If you don’t believe me, here’s a test. You hear a story about Nazis torturing the heroes of the French Resistance. Whose side are you on? The torturer or the tortured?  You know the answer. The tortured, of course. But why? The torturer is strong, potent, mighty. Why wouldn’t you want to ally yourself with him instead of the miserable, pathetic victim? Why are you disgusted not with the bleeding, maimed and wailing victim but with the victimizer? Ancient Romans would think you are nuts.

The cross that Christians wear around their necks and worship in churches is a reminder that abjection is always there. It’s an inevitable result of our physicality. As long as we are physical beings, we will know suffering and abjection. But we do not defeat suffering by inflicting it. It is only by bearing it with dignity and helping others bear it that we rise above it. This idea seems so natural to us today precisely because the Christian revolution of 2,000 years ago remade the world to reflect it.

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Published by Clarissa

20 thoughts on “Dominion: The Death on the Cross”

    1. It’s the same book but the title I gave is for the US edition.

      There’s a practice of giving different titles to the same book published in the UK and the US. It engenders enormous confusion but for some reason never goes away.

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    1. Oh, I’m so glad you liked it. This is only the first one in the series. Dominion is a very long book packed with insight. I’ll be writing about it for a while.

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  3. “That a man who had himself been crucified might be hailed as a god could not help but be seen by people everywhere across the Roman world as scandalous, obscene, grotesque.”

    While I’m hardly an expert on early Christianity, I do recall that there were quite a few offshoots and sects that were based precisely on trying to avoid this conclusion somehow (e.g., it only seemed like Christ was crucified, but it was really an illusion & etc.).

    (commenter formerly known as AcademicLurker)

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    1. Exactly, this was so painful for people to accept that, as Holland points out, it took almost 400 years after the crucifixion for Christians to begin depicting it consistently and in detail.

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  4. Very interesting.

    So the author (and you with him) believe that before Christ being on the side of the underdogs was just not a thing?

    v07

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    1. It was definitely not divine. If you were miserable, that was a sign that gods hated you. It was absolutely not a sign that gods favored you. If you were a slave (or a king who accidentally married his mom and had to scratch his eyes out as punishment), it’s because gods hated you.

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      1. “a sign that gods hated you”

        I’m wondering if this can meshed with Julian Jaynes’s Bicameral Mind and the birth of human consciousness….

        He points out that characters in the Illiad (for example) have no internal dialogue, gods appear and tell them what to do and they do it without reflection on the past, present or future…. he claims this is an intermediate stage between animal awareness and human consciousness as we understand it now.

        A lot of Christianity does seem to be about contemplating actions (in the past or future).

        I don’t know how much Judaism or Islam (or even the earliest versions of Christianity) require/support human consciousness….

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  5. This feels like a Nietzschean view in substance but with the valence shifted – glorified suffering isn’t a thousand year old con and is simply glorious.

    And I get the appeal of quiet modest bearing and the people who practice it. I don’t think you’re one of them, but maybe this part of christianity gives you a useful counterpart to your otherwise brash, ringing-in-the-ears personality. And asking other people to bear their suffering in dignity is not really examplary of the behaviour requested.

    And there’s other problems too, obviously. Making suffering divine can, did, and probably still does, turn increasing suffering into a worthwhile goal. Sometimes on a personal level where it’s mostly sad and pathetic if your mind is sober – stuff like eating leper pustules or donning hair shirts or whatever else have you. Sometimes on an ass-backwards inversion – if the suffering is divine, then how can inflicting it be substantially wrong? The torturer then, while not divine themselves, becomes a sanctioned instrument for inflicting whatever horrors they can cook up, all for the benefit of the everlasting soul of their targets.

    And on a more grounded level, it becomes incredibly difficult to make a person who does things and not one who things happen to under this thought pattern. You cannot do things because they please you, which can lead to all kinds of problems but is at least conceptually and psychologically simple. Instead you need to act on behalf of those who suffer, which then means whoever has power must both salve and prolong the suffering to maintain it. It’s awkward and weird and takes decades to get your head around for not much gain in ability.

    I understand the appeal of looking for… wellsprings of cold water for the mind, so to speak. But I honestly believe that the reason christianity might factually be one now is less due to anything inherent to the structure of its beliefs and more to the character of the people who hold on to it today. “Why discard something when it has been working to build a calm and reasonable life?” – is a belief in tradition, not christianity. Bringing christianity back into the forefront of thought would also mean that people who do not care much about tradition would have to make use of it. As an amateur medievalist, that has not been a recipe for making more lives calm and modest – christianity on its own is wild.

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    1. Suffering doesn’t need to be inflicted by an evildoer to be part of everybody’s life. I’m in physical pain right now not because anybody did anything bad to me but because I had a leg spasm and suffered an accident. Come to think of it, none of the suffering I have experienced in life was caused by anybody. I have a strong suspicion that it’s the same for you. Another thing that you and I share beyond anything else is that if you saw me with my swollen leg, you wouldn’t have an impulse to yell, “ha ha, loser”. Instead, you’ll feel compassion and look for ways to help.

      Monsieur Jourdain might be unaware that he speaks in prose but he still does it.

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      1. “if you saw me with my swollen leg, you wouldn’t have an impulse to yell, “ha ha, loser”

        I’m reminded of problems that would be aid workers supposedly have in some Buddhist (maybe Hindu as well…) societies. Trying to help someone who’s suffering can be seen as interfering with their karma… A person suffering is doing penance for misdeeds in an earlier incarnation, you help them and set back their progress…

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        1. In some places in SE asia, it is worse than that: if you help someone, you are then responsible for that person *for life* because you interfered with their karma.

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      2. Agreed on that experiential fact, yes. If I saw you in pain, I’d at least think of ways to help, and I’d expect you and most other people would do the same for others.

        I would also not expect your leg pain to be a deeply meaningful part of your life that needs reverence and contemplation, and find you most interesting because of your abilities – you are well-read and articulate. If I had to interact with you primarily on the basis of helping you with your leg pain, I am sorry to say that I would probably find it rather tedious.

        I’m not really equipped to say anything definitive on the matter, but would expect that some level of basic compassion, while certainly not the focus of their ethics, predated christianity for the romans or greeks, and that civilizations less touched by christianity still found their own ways to it in some capacity.

        Not disputing christianity’s focus on compassion, or the fact that two thousand years of history left an influence that is nigh impossible to fully disentangle from the shared idea of “just how things are.” Am claiming that it likely was not a 0 to a 100 change – humans are human and there’s only so much you can do by weighing their inherent features differently. Also claiming that seeing suffering as a mark of divinity has effects other than increasing compassion, and that some of these are really ugly.

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        1. anyone feel free to correct me if I am wrong, but before Christ, compassion or helping only applied to specific groups you had a responsibility to. We were intensely tribal. The law of the Jews described these responsibilities. What’s why the parable of the Good Samaritan is such a big deal. As was Jesus’s behavior towards people who were the lowest of the low.

          Amanda

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          1. Exactly. Time and again, Jesus shocks his followers with the mercies he extends to the people considered the lowest of the low. Prostitutes, people sick with leprosy, the congenitally disabled. Today, we don’t despise the disabled but back then it was considered that gods were punishing them for something terrible, so good people avoided them.

            Also, let’s just look at the story of Martha and Maria which is revolutionary even today, let alone 2,000 years ago. That the Son of God, no less, would tell women that their personal growth, their intellect, their sense of self was more important than cooking, cleaning and serving – think about it. Women were less than cattle at that time. This is out of this world stunning. No wonder that the contemporaries were so overcome.

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