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