‘As the Philosopher says, it is clear that some men are slaves by nature and others free by nature.’17 Even in the Indies, though, there were Spaniards who worried whether this was truly so. “When scholars in Europe sought to justify the Spanish conquest of the New World, they reached not for the Church Fathers, but for Aristotle. All are heirs to the same revolution: a revolution that has, at its molten heart, the image of a god dead on a cross.”ĭominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World It is manifest in the great surge of conversions that has swept Africa and Asia over the past century in the conviction of millions upon millions that the breath of the Spirit, like a living fire, still blows upon the world and, in Europe and North America, in the assumptions of many more millions who would never think to describe themselves as Christian. Today, the power of this strangeness remains as alive as it has ever been. It is the audacity of it-the audacity of finding in a twisted and defeated corpse the glory of the creator of the universe-that serves to explain, more surely than anything else, the sheer strangeness of Christianity, and of the civilization to which it gave birth.
This is why the cross, that ancient implement of torture, remains what it has always been: the fitting symbol of the Christian revolution. To be a Christian is to believe that God became man and suffered a death as terrible as any mortal has ever suffered. At its most profound-as Tolkien, that devout Catholic, always argued-a myth can be true.
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