A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years. By Diarmaid MacCulloch
If the kitchen scales are to be believed this book weighs in at as near two kilos as makes no difference. That’s a bit of a drawback. Unless you are training for some endurance event you’re not likely to stick it in your bag for something to read on the bus.
MacCulloch’s provocative title hints at the scale of his ambition. His history of Christianity begins with the Bronze Age Greeks’ attempts to understand their cosmos and ranges from Homer to an explanation of why Aristotle become so influential on medieval religious thought in Europe. One of the book’s charms is its liberal peppering of anecdotes. We learn of the man his contemporaries called Diogenes of Sinope or Diogenes the Cynic. These days you buy your clothes in a jumble sale if you want to show your contempt for social pressures. Diogenes conveyed the same message with onanism in the agora.
Then there is the example of Kondratii Selivanov who should stand as a warning to anyone inclined to base their thoughts and deeds overly on old books which have been frequently translated. A lot of people would have been spared a lot of pain if Selivanov’s dyslexia had been identified in childhood. The Russian word for “Redeemer” is Iskupitel’ . Selivanov misread it as Oskopitel’ which means “castrator”, a difference obvious even to the non-theologian. To make matters worse for anyone who joined his sect he mistook the Biblical injunction to the Israelites to be fruitful (plodites’) as plotitites’, meaning “castrate yourselves”. Many readers will be surprised to learn that despite the rigorous entry conditions this group lasted from the late 1700s till the mid 1950s.
The BBC has made the book into a TV series which scratches the surface of the principal themes. The same is true of the text. To take one example, the Jesuit missions to China and Japan are fascinating stories and Liam Brockey’s book Journey to the East is an excellent account of their Chinese adventures. Every single philosophical trend, historical event or artistic movement that MacCulloch refers to is already the subject of a massive literature. In 1016 pages all he can reasonably set out to do is to give the general reader a brisk introduction to the topic and anyone wishing to go down one of the countless scenic diversions is signposted by an extensive bibliography.
Self describing as the apophatic son of an Anglican cleric MacCulloch is incredibly tolerant in his judgements on all forms of Christian ideas. Now while it’s probably wrong to pick out one form of religious belief as less rational than any other you would think that the Mormons should be prominent in the line for a bit of ridicule. MacCulloch is too nice for that and lets them off the hook. He engages with every manifestation of Christian belief as some attempt to understand the divine ranging from the Gnostics, the Chalcedonians and the ancient isolated Ethiopian Church. He especially good at briskly summarising the theological disputes which led to excommunications, doctrinal clarifications and burnings and the ideological violence of many Christian leaders from the earliest days is a salutary reminder that ideas can have an impact in the real world.
The one thing MacCulloch fails in is to sufficiently set developments in religious thinking against the backdrop of the societies in which theological innovation was taking place. It’s as if the academic believes that ideas are disconnected from the material world. At a basic level he does not even point out that a big attraction of the religion in early medieval Europe was that it offered local rulers a ready made literate bureaucracy to help administer their kingdoms which was a competitive advantage indigenous religions generally lacked. He compensates for this lack by trying to understand how the persistence of Christianity is partly due to it being appropriated by communities onto which it was forced. The picture is a Haitian representation of Saint Patrick, a slave himself according to the myth, who is often to be found in the churches of the descendants of slaves. Whether it’s Mexican Cristeros or charismatic contemporary African religious practice the author is intensely sympathetic to the rank and file who give life to these movements. He does not seem too fond of Benny Ratzinger.
Provided that you’re not irrationally hostile to every positive reference to religion A History of Christianity is a useful addition to the bookshelves of anyone wanting an elegantly written and often witty tour d’horizon of three millennia of intellectual history but don’t plan on taking it to the beach.
Liam redux 
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