XPost: alt.religion.christianity, alt.christian.religion, alt.christnet.ethics XPost: alt.religion, soc.history
From: hayesstw@telkomsa.net

Tom Holland: Why I was wrong about Christianity

It took me a long time to realise my morals are not Greek or Roman,
but thoroughly, and proudly, Christian.

BY
TOM HOLLAND

When I was a boy, my upbringing as a Christian was forever being
weathered by the gale force of my enthusiasms. First, there were
dinosaurs. I vividly remember my shock when, at Sunday school one day,
I opened a children’s Bible and found an illustration on its first
page of Adam and Eve with a brachiosaur. Six years old I may have
been, but of one thing – to my regret – I was rock-solid certain: no
human being had ever seen a sauropod. That the teacher seemed not to
care about this error only compounded my sense of outrage and
bewilderment. A faint shadow of doubt, for the first time, had been
brought to darken my Christian faith.

With time, it darkened further still. My obsession with dinosaurs – glamorous, ­ferocious, extinct – evolved seamlessly into an obsession
with ancient empires. When I read the Bible, the focus of my
fascination was less the children of Israel or Jesus and his disciples
than their adversaries: the Egyptians, the Assyrians, the Romans. In a
similar manner, although I vaguely continued to believe in God, I
found Him infinitely less charismatic than my favourite Olympians:
Apollo, Athena, Dionysus. Rather than lay down laws and condemn other
deities as demons, they preferred to enjoy themselves. And if they
were vain, selfish and cruel, that only served to endow them with the
allure of rock stars.

By the time I came to read Edward Gibbon and the other great writers
of the Enlightenment, I was more than ready to accept their
interpretation of history: that the triumph of Christianity had
ushered in an “age of superstition and credulity”, and that modernity
was founded on the dusting down of long-forgotten classical values. My childhood instinct to think of the biblical God as the po-faced enemy
of liberty and fun was rationalised. The defeat of paganism had
ushered in the reign of Nobodaddy, and of all the crusaders,
inquisitors and black-hatted puritans who had served as his acolytes.
Colour and excitement had been drained from the world. “Thou hast
conquered, O pale Galilean,” Swinburne wrote, echoing the apocryphal
lament of Julian the Apostate, the last pagan emperor of Rome. “The
world has grown grey from thy breath.” Instinctively, I agreed.

So, perhaps it was no surprise that I should have continued to cherish classical antiquity as the period that most stirred and inspired me.
When I came to write my first work of history, Rubicon, I chose a
subject that had been particularly close to the hearts of the
philosophes: the age of Cicero. The theme of my second, Persian Fire,
was one that even in the 21st century was serving Hollywood, as it had
served Montaigne and Byron, as an archetype of the triumph of liberty
over despotism: the Persian invasions of Greece.

The years I spent writing these studies of the classical world –
living intimately in the company of Leonidas and of Julius Caesar, of
the hoplites who had died at Thermopylae and of the legionaries who
had triumphed at Alesia – only confirmed me in my fascination: for
Sparta and Rome, even when subjected to the minutest historical
inquiry, did not cease to seem possessed of the qualities of an apex
predator. They continued to stalk my imaginings as they had always
done – like a tyrannosaur.

Yet giant carnivores, however wondrous, are by their nature
terrifying. The longer I spent immersed in the study of classical
antiquity, the more alien and unsettling I came to find it. The values
of Leonidas, whose people had practised a peculiarly murderous form of eugenics, and trained their young to kill uppity Untermenschen by
night, were nothing that I recognised as my own; nor were those of
Caesar, who was reported to have killed a million Gauls and enslaved a
million more. It was not just the extremes of callousness that I came
to find shocking, but the lack of a sense that the poor or the weak
might have any intrinsic value. As such, the founding conviction of
the Enlightenment – that it owed nothing to the faith into which most
of its greatest figures had been born – increasingly came to seem to
me unsustainable.

“Every sensible man,” Voltaire wrote, “every honourable man, must hold the Christian sect in horror.” Rather than acknowledge that his
ethical principles might owe anything to Christianity, he preferred to
derive them from a range of other sources – not just classical
literature, but Chinese philosophy and his own powers of reason. Yet
Voltaire, in his concern for the weak and ­oppressed, was marked more enduringly by the stamp of biblical ethics than he cared to admit. His
defiance of the Christian God, in a paradox that was certainly not
unique to him, drew on motivations that were, in part at least,
recognisably Christian.

“We preach Christ crucified,” St Paul declared, “unto the Jews a stumbling block, and unto the Greeks foolishness.” He was right.
Nothing could have run more counter to the most profoundly held
assumptions of Paul’s contemporaries – Jews, or Greeks, or Romans. The notion that a god might have suffered torture and death on a cross was
so shocking as to appear repulsive. Familiarity with the biblical
narrative of the Crucifixion has dulled our sense of just how
completely novel a deity Christ was. In the ancient world, it was the
role of gods who laid claim to ruling the universe to uphold its order
by inflicting punishment – not to suffer it themselves.

Today, even as belief in God fades across the West, the countries that
were once collectively known as Christendom continue to bear the stamp
of the two-millennia-old revolution that Christianity represents. It
is the principal reason why, by and large, most of us who live in post-Christian societies still take for granted that it is nobler to
suffer than to inflict suffering. It is why we generally assume that
every human life is of equal value. In my morals and ethics, I have
learned to accept that I am not Greek or Roman at all, but thoroughly
and proudly Christian.

Tom Holland’s most recent book, “Dynasty: the Rise and Fall of the
House of Caesar”, is published by Abacus

Source: https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/religion/2016/09/tom-holland-why-i-was-wrong-about-christianity


--
Steve Hayes from Tshwane, South Africa
Web: http://www.khanya.org.za/stevesig.htm
Blog: http://khanya.wordpress.com

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