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Sept. 5, 2019 - The Delingpod - James Delingpole
01:08:49
Delingpod 35: Tom Holland
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Welcome to the DellingPod with me, James DellingPod.
And it's called the DellingVidiPod now as well, isn't it?
Because we're actually getting pictures to go with it for those of you who can't listen to words on their own and have to have pretty pictures to go with them.
So here I am with my...
I am so excited about this week's guest.
His name is Tom Holland.
Tom, welcome.
Thank you very much, James, for your lovely introduction.
I'm very touched.
I think we're going to have a competition this week to see which is the more interesting brother.
I surrender immediately.
I don't know anything about tanks.
And I know that that's the way to your heart.
Well, I do like a tank.
I know you do.
But I have to say, in your book, you have something that in a way transcends tank warfare.
I'd like to think so.
Martyrdom.
Yes.
I mean, I'd heard that phrase before.
By the way, Tom's book is a masterpiece.
It's a tour de force, and I really mean that.
Are you going to give the name?
Or should I give the name?
Tell us what your book's called, Tom.
It's called Dominion, The Making of the Western Mind.
But The Making of the Western Mind doesn't really tell you what the book is about.
The book is actually about Christianity as history's most revolutionary force.
And the reason it doesn't mention Christianity is because everyone's worried that that might put people off.
So it's my task to try and persuade you that that is not actually an off-putting subject.
That's really interesting you say that.
Because I have to say...
Until I read your brilliant book, Dominion, by the way.
Did I mention that before?
Yeah, let's...
Dominion, folks.
Before I mention...
Before I read your brilliant book, I too kind of thought that Christianity was a bit of a boring...
In fact, the Bible, pretty boring.
No, the Bible's not boring.
No, the Bible is really amazing.
I mean, people having tent pegs hammered through their skulls and...
Fiery pits.
I mean, it's amazing.
Yeah, yeah.
Really amazing.
No, I agree it's amazing, but...
I mean, apart from all the kind of, you know, the stuff about people begetting each other and...
Well, what I was thinking more is sheep and stuff.
I'm old enough.
But apart from that.
I'm of the generation, probably the last generation, where people went to Sunday school fairly routinely, and we did this thing at school called scripture.
Yes, like Percy Worcester, who got the scripture prize.
Yeah, we knew all the Bible stories.
And one of the things that really saddened me, actually, as a digression, and I know I hardly ever digress, but I went back to my old school a few years ago and talked to a history teacher who'd been there, one of the last teachers who'd been there when I was at school.
And he said to me that...
Yeah.
the Bible stories.
So you might, you might mention the, the wedding at Cana and they wouldn't know.
Well, I, I, I think that, that, um, the argument of the book is that, um, Christianity has so saturated everything that everybody in the West does that essentially it's the water inside the goldfish bowl in which we as goldfish are all swimming.
Um, However, that said, I do think that...
Abruptly and within our lifetimes, there has been a kind of precipitous drop in the number of people, as you say, who are familiar with the most basic biblical stories.
And so it may be that we are now genuinely looking at the fading of that.
But even so, even were no one to know anything about the Bible or the history of Christianity or anything, the West would remain fundamentally shaped by that Christian inheritance.
It would make no difference at all.
We're going to develop that point later on, obviously, because it is what the book's about.
I did kind of think that the Bible and Christianity was a dull subject because, I suppose, well, it's not like battles.
I mean, okay, you've got Jericho and stuff, but it's not like proper war.
Well, what I felt when I was growing up, and I was really into the Bible in the way that I was basically into any ancient texts or accounts, The Old Testament was vastly more fun than the New.
I mean, actually, there were loads of battles.
There were loads of kings slaughtering each other.
The priests of Baal being annihilated.
I mean, it's full of amazing stuff.
And then the New Testament seemed slightly dreary in comparison.
You know, because obviously the famous thing that Jesus does is he doesn't fight back.
He doesn't fight back, no!
He allows himself to be nailed to that cross.
And really, you know, if you want a bit of blood and thunder, really it's the book of Revelation or bust, that there isn't really anything else.
I mean, Revelation's a fantastic, kind of phantasmagoric book.
Well, I've seen a story with the number of beasts.
Exactly.
So, I mean, that's great.
But generally in the New Testament, there's a kind of lack of the high adventure that you might get in the Iliad or the Old Testament.
He'd have been absolutely crap at Troy, wouldn't he?
Jesus.
He would have just...
I feel you probably wouldn't...
He wouldn't be first.
He wouldn't be the first guy you'd pick to fight for.
No, he wouldn't.
No.
In fact, he wouldn't even have been mentioned, would he?
But in a way, it's...
I mean, that kind of illustrates what is so astonishing about the figure of Jesus and the New Testament and Christianity is precisely that in the context of a world that was incredibly violent, that absolutely valorised prowess in warfare, that this figure of a man who suffers the most excruciating and humiliating death imaginable, a death and a torture that is seen to be fitted...
Peculiarly for slaves that he should have been identified as in some way a part of the one God who had created all the heavens and the earth and Ended up worshipped as a god by billions of people living in places that he had never heard of.
And really that is the scale of the revolution that interests me, is how is it that someone who seems by the scale of the Iliad or the Aeneid or whatever to be incredibly wussy...
How does he end up having this astonishing status?
And what does that say about the society and the civilisation that ends up putting him at its centre?
Well, indeed.
I mean, having read your book, I'm obviously more enlightened than I was before I'd read it.
But even so, I'm not sure that I could explain why it is that...
What's the appeal of somebody who is a...
He isn't a wimp, in a way.
I mean, he's a very brave wimp.
A brave wimp.
A brave wimp.
You should be on Thor for the day.
Also, let's be frank.
Let's be frank.
A bit of a commie.
He's a brave wimp and commie.
Let me play the devil's advocate here, Tom.
Which is to say, look, it is not given to many of us to be heroes.
If we were going to be in the front ranks at Troy, we'd have to train for ages, we'd have to be fearless, we'd have to have huge muscles and stuff.
Whereas...
I should say that in the earliest portrayals of Jesus after the Roman Empire has become Christian, so after constant time.
When they start to portray him on the cross, there's no attempt to portray his actual agony.
He's massively buff.
It looks like he's just been having a huge workout in the gym.
And he is an athlete because he's gone through the agon.
He's gone through the contest.
And that's what death is and the resurrection.
So he is seen as being very well. - Yeah. - So he's very, very buff. - Yeah, I do quite like the Jesus in South Park.
The one with, you know, I'm packing.
I've never watched South Park, I'm ashamed to say.
Jesus and South Park carries machine guns and he's awesome.
But yeah, so you had the Age of Heroes, you had the Iliad and obviously Marshall Prowess was celebrated.
Um, Jesus...
I mean, anyone can do it.
All you've got to have...
All you've got to be like Jesus, you've just got to be willing to humiliate yourself and to die horribly.
The, um...
One of the key figures in the book, I should explain that it goes chronologically from 479 BC right the way up to 2012.
And the way it works is that they're obviously vast subjects, so how do you impose order on the immense scale of the tapestry?
And the way that I've done it is to draw on Christian symbolic numerology, which of course three and seven are the key numbers.
Three for the Trinity, seven for the sacraments, the sins...
So there are three sections, antiquity, Christendom, modernitas.
Each of those three sections is divided into seven chapters.
Each of those seven chapters has three sections.
Each chapter begins with a particular vignette, a particular moment.
So you might have...
It ranges from a Persian general being crucified on the Hellespont by the Athenians right the way up to the Beatles recording All You Need Is Love.
But one of the key figures in this kind of panoramic history is Nietzsche, Friedrich Nietzsche, the great German philosopher, who in many ways is the most scabrous critic of Christianity.
And he's...
Honest in his criticism in a way that lots of atheists today aren't, celebrity atheists aren't, because they may say, I don't believe in the Christian God, but it's manifest in almost everything that they say and do, that they do believe in the kind of baggage of Christian morality and ethics that comes from that.
Nietzsche hated Christian ethics, he hated Christian morals, and he loathed Christianity basically for having suppressed the sense of pagan virtue that you've just been eulogising, the sense of getting ready for war, of, you know, fighting before the walls of Troy, that kind of glamorous savagery and cruelty that is manifest in so much, not just Greek myth, but pretty much all...
No, well, we'll come to that in a minute.
But basically all the kind of the mythology and the epic of the ancient world.
And Nietzsche says, well, what happens with Jesus is that Christianity serves to make the victim the hero.
It serves to make those who are low.
It serves to make not the guy who nails the...
who's having the nails driven through his his but flesh and bones being pinned to the cross he's the guy who becomes the center of attention and the the he what Nietzsche says is that the seismic understanding of christianity is that weakness is a form of strength yeah because it can shame and humble and humiliate
the strong and the powerful and Nietzsche was pledged to the idea that this was this was wrong and that that christianity was a kind of sickness and that the obsession with the with the weak with the poor had to be overthrown and we had to to get back to revalorizing strength and potency and indeed cruelty um and
And the odd thing is that in the process of writing this book and researching it, I read an enormous amount, and I read a lot of Christian apologetics, people writing in defence of Christianity, arguing in favour of it, but there was almost no one I read that made me personally feel more Christian than Nietzsche, because the depth of his contempt and hatred for everything that I actually most value in Christianity is incredibly powerful.
And it kind of opens your eyes to what a world might be where people don't actually hold to the values that Christianity has enshrined in our civilisation.
And it's perfectly possible to imagine what that world might look like, because essentially it would look quite like the Greek world, the Roman world, the world that existed before Christianity.
And were that world to be fused with science and particularly with a kind of eugenicist understanding of Darwinism, then we get something quite like Nazism.
Right.
Quite like fascism.
And fascism essentially is an attempt both to go back to a pre-Christian period.
So that's why Mussolini initially is so fascinated with the figure of Augustus, the emperor who rules before Jesus is born.
So, And then Hitler, of course, as well, you know, fascinated with the Spartans, with the Romans, with the blonde beasts, in Nietzsche's words, who'd inhabited the German forests.
But, of course, he's also very keen to look forward to the future.
It's a very futurist project, fascism and Nazis in particular, and is invoking...
Trends in science and technology that Hitler sees as being beyond the Christian era.
And it becomes the stated aim of Hitler to destroy Christianity utterly within a kind of 40 year programme.
And anything that is left of the Christian faith has to be subordinated and turned to what Hitler casts as simultaneously the ancient and the modern programme that he represents.
And so...
Nazism is an attempt consciously to repudiate everything within European civilisation that derives from Christianity, and essentially that's pretty much everything.
Right.
And I suppose life under the Islamic State would be another example of the kind of...
Well, yes and no.
I mean, it's complicated.
On the one hand, while I was writing this book, I made a film...
Very bravely.
Well, it was the closest to homicidal maniacs that I've ever come to in my life.
And it involved going to Sinjar, which is a city that the Islamic State had captured where the Yazidis, a religious minority, lived.
Islamic State regarded them as pagans and enslaved a lot of the women, killed a lot of the ones that they didn't find attractive enough to enslave and crucified a lot of the men.
So I was in the rubble of this town, which had just been liberated a few weeks before, and the Islamic State were a mile or so beyond flat terrain.
So kind of within striking distance.
And being in this town and knowing that people had been crucified there and suffered that death, and that the people who had done that were within striking distance.
And to know that they were crucifying people in exactly the way that the Romans had crucified people.
The aim was to intimidate, to terrify, to set up a sense of dread deep within the stomach so that you, as someone who has no way of fighting back against them, is utterly intimidated by them, utterly prostrated before them.
And it was the first time that I had had to contemplate the reality of crucifixion, but also the reality of a world in which the concept of crucifixion is unmediated by the role that it plays in Christian civilisation.
Because the cross is probably the single most culturally recognizable symbol that humanity has ever devised.
And so whenever you see it...
You are inclined to think of the figure of Jesus.
And you may not be a Christian.
You may not believe a word of it.
You may be antithetical to Christianity.
And yet, what the cross symbolises is the triumph of the weak over imperial power.
It's the triumph of...
It's about finding victory in the heart of defeat.
And it's an incredibly powerful myth.
It's the most symbolically potent myth that humanity has ever devised.
And to contemplate crucifixion as something that does not have that, I found utterly terrifying.
And it made me realise that...
I take that so for granted that actually to confront a world where that no longer exists is, I found, a kind of terrifying thing.
And it was a strongly influential process then of writing this book.
That the whole way through, Christianity's influence ultimately is not about...
Whether you believe in God or what this Bible verse says or what the church says you should or shouldn't do.
It's about ultimately the kind of the molten core of the faith.
If you think of it as a kind of mighty power station generating waves of power, the molten heart of that station is the myth of the cross and the resurrection.
And a world without that, I think, would be really terrifying.
Both Paul, St.
Paul, who is the first Christian writer that we have, he recognises that the cross lines are the heart of the message that he's given.
And he recognises that this is a scandal, a shock, that it's almost impossible to understand, and yet that's what he's preaching.
And then Nietzsche, at the end of the Christian period, likewise, he also said this is the most shocking idea, the most shocking symbol that humanity's ever come up with.
He hates it.
But he recognises the form, the seismic civilisational transformation that it was able to generate.
And he hates and fears it because he recognises its power.
So you spend a lot of your history writing career in ancient times, in pre-Christian times, and Before Christianity came along, were there no tempering forces on human behaviour?
Of course.
Absolutely.
So what were they?
Well, Christianity emerges from a kind of melting pot of different cultures.
And Eusebius, who is a bishop who writes The Life of Constantine in the early 4th century...
When he writes about...
He writes about why was Jesus born when he was born.
And he says, well, he was born in the reign of Augustus and Augustus had just united the world.
So Rome rules this vast empire.
And for the first time, people from, you know, the Atlantic to...
Near East had joined in a single global order.
And he says, well, this is proof of God's providence, because if this hadn't happened, then the message of the gospel would not have been able to spread as easily he did.
I mean, in a sense, he's right.
I mean, you don't have to invoke But it's clearly the fact, it's clear that what the Roman world facilitates is the mixing and mingling of different cultural traditions.
And those cultural traditions, most obviously, there's the tradition of the Hebrew Scriptures.
Of Jewish civilization, which we shouldn't call Judaism.
There is a Greek word, Eudaismos, which is often translated as Judaism, but that's hugely anachronistic.
What it means is Jewishness.
So it relates to the possible span of the ways that you can be Jewish.
And it's probably best to think of Jewishness as points on a bandwidth.
So at one end, there is the idea that This one God is the God of Israel, bound by a covenant with one particular people.
And at the other, he is the God who has created the heavens and the earth, and therefore every human being on the face of the planet.
Which one do you choose to emphasise?
And what becomes Christianity emerges out of this by emphasising the universal God.
What will become the kind of Talmudic tradition, the rabbinical tradition, is one that emphasises God's role as the God of Israel.
So that's obviously the key kind of determinant.
But you also have other influences as well.
You have the influence of Persia, which has kind of refracted through the Jewish traditions.
And the key thing about Persian idea is this kind of notion of a dualistic world where the entire universe is to be understood in moral terms, that there are rival principles of darkness and light, of the lie and of truth.
Also, there is the idea that there will be an end of days, that there will be a day of judgment, and all these kind of concepts.
So that encourages you to behave well?
Yeah, well, basically it moralises almost everything you do.
Anything that you do, anything in the world, is somehow part of a kind of moral dimension.
So that's very important.
So people had a moral conscience before Jesus?
Well, so the word conscience is a really interesting one.
It's a Greek concept, specifically a Stoic concept.
And before Rome, there is Greece.
So there is Alexander, who conquers the Near East and founds the great city of Alexandria, which is the city where most Jews live, far more than in Jerusalem.
So Jews become very, very...
It's Hellenised in the way that lots of Jews now are Anglicised, just as there are Jews now who speak English but don't speak Hebrew.
Say likewise, there are lots of Jews who only speak Greek but didn't speak Hebrew.
One of the philosophies...
Which is very influential on Christianity is Stoicism and Stoicism has this idea that basically the divine is manifest within everything and therefore the whole world is a cosmopolis or a great kind of universal city and therefore there is basically a kind of commonality.
Everybody has a kind of shared identity and The spark of the divine that every human being has, the Stoics call it synodesis, and conscience is effectively the closest translation we have of that.
And when Paul comes to write his letters, he's saying that the covenant that existed between the God of Israel and...
The chosen people that this is no longer necessary because now with Christ's death on the cross a new covenant has been established which is binds everybody and the way that that becomes manifest is where you discover the knowledge that Christ has died for you in your heart and the law of God rather than being written on the tablets as it had been at Mount Sinai is now written on your heart and Paul reaches for this word synodesis the Stoic word for conscience
and he says conscience is where the law of God is written and that's a seismically influential moment because it means that in Christian civilization there is a concept of God's law but it's not written down in the way that it is in Hebrew scripture and the way that it will be in Islamic scripture.
Instead, it's written on the heart.
And so that means that your concept of what is right and wrong can evolve over time.
Moving forward, if you look at the sixth and seventh centuries, you have three massive bodies of law that emerges from that.
It's a kind of massively legally codifying age.
You have the Talmud.
Jewish body of law, you have the Sunnah, Islamic body of law, and then you have the great corpus of Roman law.
Now, only one of those, I mean, the Talmud and the Sunnah supposedly come directly from God, so its divinity is manifest within it.
The body of Roman law is secular.
The emperors who codify them are Christian, but it doesn't matter that the laws that they're codifying come from the pagan Roman past.
And that means that in Christian civilisation...
It's fine for laws that are authored by humans to offer a kind of idea that this is an ultimate legal recourse that you do not get in Jewish and Islamic civilisation.
So that's a kind of fundamental aspect that derives from Christianity.
And this idea of conscience, this idea that God speaks to you, lets you know what is true, That the light of his truth irradiates you and hopefully the world beyond.
That also is a massively potent idea because it feeds into the idea that human society can be progressive, that you can get to know things better, that the more the light of conscience shines, so the better you can become, so the better your laws can become, so the better your society can become.
In Latin Christendom in the West, by the 11th century, this idea has been fused with the idea that the whole of society can be lit by the light of God, that it can be born again, that it can be kind of baptised in the water of the Spirit.
And that then imports the idea that everything in society can be improved, because essentially up until that point, Most people had an understanding of society with which I'm personally hugely sympathetic that all change is bad.
That you shouldn't change anything.
Things are much better.
Just leave it as it is.
In the 11th century, that idea is fundamentally, radically and permanently changed in the West because the idea that you can make society better gets embedded in the fabric of what will become that this kind of papal order that emerges and will become the civilization first of medieval Christendom, then with the Reformation, then with the French Revolution, now with the 60s and its aftermath.
The same impulses are reverberating out and out and out like the kind of ripples from a mighty earthquake.
So this idea that there is evolution built into Christianity, is that why we've got this situation where, well, the concept of the secular you mentioned, is it why Islam is not capable of doing this because it hasn't got that inbuilt concept?
Well, it's fixed.
Islam and Christianity come from the same matrix.
So, you know, if you're...
Say you were...
I mean, to a Hindu, for instance, it's often said that to Hindu, Christianity and Islam are merely kind of shoots off the same branch.
Yeah.
And obviously that's true.
But in the same way, you know, there are profound and fundamental differences between the civilizations as they've grown up.
And...
One of the difficulties with recognising that is, again, precisely the degree to which the Christian notion of there being something called a religion has become universal.
Wherever European languages are spoken, and often beyond that as well, the concept that there is something called a religion exists.
And people tend to assume that this is, you know, you might as well say...
There are trees or there are dogs as their religions.
It seems to be as natural as that.
But it isn't.
The concept of religion, again, is a highly culturally It's a distinctive notion that is bred of the marrow of Christian assumptions.
And essentially it relates to what you were talking about, about the concept of the secular, which again is a wholly contingent, culturally specific idea, which no other civilisation has really...
There's no concept of the secular in Islam.
No, and there wasn't a concept of the secular in Christianity really until the early Middle Ages really.
So Abelard and the people like that.
Yes, around that period.
And it really goes back to the time of Augustine, who is living when Rome in 410 is sacked.
And there are lots of Romans who haven't become Christian who say, well, this is because we've abandoned the old ways, we've abandoned the old gods, so we're being punished.
And Augustine says, no, not at all.
The divine cannot be manifest in the earthly order.
Only the radiant purity of heaven is eternal.
Everything human, everything mortal, everything terrestrial is in a state of flux.
And he reaches for a Latin word, cyclum, to define that.
And cyclum literally means the limit of the span of human memory.
So 80 years, 100 years, 120 years, it comes to be identified with 100 years.
So hence, cyclum feeds into, you know, siècle, French word, century, and so on.
And so the cyclin, the world, the dimension of the cyclin, the city of man, gets counterpointed to the city of God.
Right.
And if you want to, as a human who is trapped within the cyclin, the flux of things, if you want to get close to God before death, then you need to bind yourself to him.
And again, in Latin, there is a word religio, which in the classical period meant something that binds you to a god.
So it could be priesthood, it could be a festival, it could be a sacrifice.
Right.
In the Christian period, a religio comes to mean those who...
Religiones are those who particularly bind themselves to God.
So monks, nuns, hermits, people like that.
And over the course of the early Middle Ages and then into the high Middle Ages, you get this idea that there's the dimension of religio and there's the dimension of the cyclum.
And this becomes institutionalised in the 11th century when kind of radicals, and in fact you could almost say heretics, They seize control of the most prestigious bishopric in Christendom, that of Rome.
And out of this kind of papal order, they found Europe's first great revolutionary order, which says that the dimension of the church, of the sacred, of the holy, of religio has to be permanently and fundamentally separated from of religio has to be permanently and fundamentally separated from the dimension of the cyclone.
So kings and emperors who until that point had had the perfect right to appoint bishops and themselves had all kinds of sacral power, they get kind of shoved to one side.
And basically there's a great project to drain the dimension of the cyclone of things that had made it sacred.
And the effect of that is to kind of institutionalise this idea that there is a division between the dimension, let's say, of religio and the dimension of the cyclum.
And then in the Reformation, the Protestant Reformation...
Everyone has a religio.
It's not just monks anymore.
Everyone has a religio.
And so you start to get a new sense of what becomes anglicised to become religion.
So religion has two shades of meaning.
On the one hand, it's the personal relationship that you as a believer have with the divine.
What do you believe?
What do you think?
What's your relationship to a god?
This is what religion means to a Christian in the 17th, 18th century.
And then against that, it's something that can be defined against the secular.
So it's something that's kind of to one side.
So religion is something that is separate from society, economy, music, culture, whatever.
So you have secular music, you have religious music, and everyone starts to know what that means.
And so the idea that religion is something that can be parked on one side, by the time that the British start...
For instance, to take over India.
This is something that they're absolutely taking for granted.
And when they go abroad, they get asked, well, what is the religion of people in the Ottoman Empire?
Oh, it's something called Islam.
What's the religion of people in Hindustan, where the Hindus live, the Indians live?
Oh, it must be something called Hinduism.
And so Christians construct this idea of there being world religions.
But Christianity is, of course, the prototype.
So it's like the legend of Percustes, the thief, the robber that Theseus kills in the legend, who supposedly takes travellers and makes them sleep in his magical bed, and it always fits them.
And the way that he makes...
is if they're too short he racks them and if they're too long he chops bits off yeah and that's essentially what modern western society you know imperialism has done with the belief systems and the structures of belief of of other civilizations is that it's imposed this procrustean model of religion you know across the entire world and so To that extent...
Hinduism, Islam, Judaism, these are all concepts that have been Christianised.
And there's an Indian scholar who said, I think, accurately and brilliantly, that Christianisation advances in two ways.
It advances through conversion, obviously, but it also proceeds through secularisation.
In other words, in convincing societies that there is something called the secular and that there is something called religion that is separate from it.
And in that sense, although the Raj did not convert India to Christianity on any mass scale, it did convert it to secularism.
And when the Raj ended and the British left, India was re-established as a secular republic and to this day it remains a secular republic.
I like that.
And so that's part of what Modi is about.
Because Modi and what's called Hindu nationalism, essentially it's...
It's a response to this.
It's a recognition of the fact that the secular is not, as Western liberals and liberals across the world like to think, something that is just a natural state.
It's not.
It's specific to a particular civilization that has exported this idea around the world.
And same with Japan.
Japan is not at all a Christian country.
Christianity was brutally and highly effectively wiped out in Japan in the 17th century.
But Japan also is now secular.
Right.
So...
So Richard Dawkins is going to love this when he...
Well, I don't know.
I mean, I... I'm kind of torn about that because, on the one hand, it bemuses me that someone like Dawkins, a brilliant evolutionary biologist who's fathomed the mysteries of how things change over the course of time, on the level of geological time, how reluctant he seems to be to recognise that the same thing has happened in the dimension of human culture.
He's the guy who invented the concept of memes.
I mean, he should...
It surprises me that he doesn't recognise how he himself is Christian in exactly the same way that Bishop Wilberforce in the great debate with Huxley, denied being an ape.
But at the same time, I think there is, you know, there's a part of Dawkins which clearly recognises he is Christian.
There was this kind of famous tweet that he put out, I think, a couple of years ago, where he was sitting in the cloisters of Winchester Cathedral listening to the bells.
And he said, you know...
How much more charming it is to listen to church bells than to Allahu Akbar.
And then he pauses, and you can hear him thinking on his phone as he's putting this, and there's a dash, and then he says, or is that just my cultural upbringing?
And of course it's his cultural upbringing.
You know, he refers church bells to Allahu Akbar because he comes from a Christian society.
And in exactly the same way, he thinks the things that he does...
Because his assumptions are shaped by the conditioning of a millennium and more of Christian assumptions, ethics, morals, evolution, if you will.
How much of Christianity has to do with the life of Jesus and his suffering on the cross?
And how much of it is to do with the accretions that occurred afterwards?
And people like St.
Paul, all the people who've sort of interpreted it and...
Well, the question of who the historical Jesus was is fortunately one that I don't have to engage with because it's irrelevant to the story that I'm telling and essentially to have an opinion on that you need to have studied it for years and years and years and even then you probably won't be certain.
Is there much on the historical Jesus?
Oh, I mean, there are entire forests have been felled to provide the books which discuss the issue of what the relationship of the historical Jesus is to the Jesus of the four canonical Gospels.
So that's not important.
But what is important is the figure of Jesus in the Gospels.
And that is remarkable enough, even if it bears no correspondence to a historical Jesus at all.
Because if you think about it, I mean, it's the most...
It's a challenging literary gig you could possibly imagine.
I mean, imagine being told you've got to write a story in which, for the first time, somebody who suffers the excruciating death of a slave is going to be cast as, in some way, being a part of the one creator God who's fashioned everything.
And he's got to be convincing, not just to people now, but for 2,000 years and across the whole span of the world.
I mean, it's a really astonishing thing to have pulled off as a literary feat.
And that four people did it is amazing.
So the figure of Jesus is obviously kind of lies at the heart of it.
And the understanding of...
And the crucifixion and the resurrection absolutely lies at the heart of it.
And the understanding of what that means, what you get with Paul is He senses that something amazing has happened.
He clearly thinks that Jesus has risen from the dead.
He clearly thinks that Jesus has appeared to him.
He's clearly been blinded by a sudden understanding that the Messiah, who he had imagined would be a warrior coming in glory, in fact, was this broken figure who died bloodied and beaten on an implement of torture.
And the revelation of this He stupefies and bewilders and awes and stuns and excites and moves him and inspires him to spread the message across the Roman world.
The early centuries of Christianity are basically an attempt by Christians to understand what the hell is going on with this.
Who is Jesus exactly?
What is God's purpose?
And the construction of what comes to be called orthodoxy, the kind of straight path, the right way of doing things.
Is constructed over many, many centuries.
Of course, what that also opens up is what do you then do with people who may disagree with you?
Burn them, obviously.
Well, not to begin with.
Right.
Not to begin with.
It takes almost a thousand years for the first people who are called heretics.
In other words, it comes from the Greek.
It means people who choose by implication the wrong way.
Right.
And even then the church is reluctant to do it, but what changes is, I mean, and so it reflects a kind of paradox at the heart of Christianity, which remains at the heart of liberalism as well, unsurprisingly, because liberalism is, you know, part of the fabric of Christian civilization, which is what do you do with people who do not want your universal message of love and brotherhood?
And again, this goes back to Paul, because Paul writes to the Galatians and says that there is no Jew or Greek anymore.
Christ has come.
Differences are gone.
There are no differences between the Jews and the Greeks.
We're all one in Christ.
Which is amazingly, you know, hippie-doo.
Who doesn't love that?
Teach the world to sing.
That kind of thing.
Except that if you're a Jew, and you don't want to be swallowed up in some kind of lovey-dovey, universalist mush, then what are you going to do?
And that really is the question that haunts Christians.
the more powerful the more um essentially able to impose itself the church becomes what do you do for instance with jews is is is lies at the you know i mean that's a question that that christians are permanently bumping their heads against to the misfortune of of jews What do you do with Muslims?
What do you do with pagans?
What do you do with heretics?
And over the course of the Middle Ages, The notion that you can burn and kill people in the name of love, that you can bully and pressure and harass and torment people for not loving enough, for not caring for the weak and the poor and the oppressed enough.
Generates this paradox.
Yeah.
Which is one that runs right the way through the Reformation.
It's there clearly in the French Revolution.
It's clearly there in the Russian Revolution that you have to kill people to make them equal.
And it's kind of there in the culture wars at the moment.
You know, if you're woke...
You are awakened.
And the idea of being awakened is an enduring Christian metaphor running throughout Anglo-American Protestantism is the idea of great awakenings.
And that idea in turn goes back to the writings of Luther, which in turn goes back through the writings of Luther.
Church and church fathers, the idea that you get awakened the light, you've been brought to the light, you've recognized your sin, you've recognized that the sufferings of the weak and the oppressed and the poor, they have to be prioritized.
They have a value.
The first shall be last and the last shall be first.
And then the question comes, of course, what do you do with people who don't agree with you?
And so...
Just as Inquisitors ended up happy to push people, heretics, to repent, and then if they didn't repent, hand them over to the secular arm to be burnt.
Yes.
So ever since then, there's been a pattern throughout...
Western history where people who see themselves as endowed with a kind of blinding revelatory moral insight that justifies them in overthrowing a corrupt order, a depraved Babylon,
be it Protestant reformers, be it French revolutionaries, be it woke academics, The same kind of central dynamic is played out, and that also is a fundamental inheritance from the Christian past.
Yes, so it's a double-edged sword, isn't it?
The wonderful, nice things it's done made us all compassionate and stuff.
It also made us sort of sanctimonious.
Christianity is founded on...
On paradox.
It's founded on the idea that the cross is a symbol of life.
That, you know, man is a god.
That a god becomes man.
that the kind of the generational moment in history, the death of Christ and the resurrection, it's kind of like a singularity and paradoxes and opposites and ambivalences it's kind of like a singularity and paradoxes and opposites and ambivalences are kind of crushed together to create a great explosive moment of light
But to try and untease those paradoxes and those ambivalences, it leaves paradox at the heart of Christian civilisation.
And what I think for the church in particular has kind of highlighted that is that a church that is raised on the idea that a slave was greater than the most powerful of emperors...
When it itself becomes the religion of the Roman Empire and then in due course it becomes the kind of hegemonic faith of kings and emperors and then of conquerors who spread across the world.
It's always shadowed by how do you resolve the tension between the fact that Christianity has become incredibly powerful with the notion that actually there is a power in powerlessness and And one of the reasons why institutional Christianity in the West,
I think, has declined is that this has become an increasing source of anxiety and tension for people who are shot through with Christian values.
So you'll get people who say, well, I reject the church because it's oppressive, it's patriarchal, it's...
You know, it's bullying.
It tells people what to do.
You know, I want to be free.
But that yearning for freedom, that yearning to reject structures of power, be they patriarchal or whatever, is itself bred of the Christian idea that actually weakness is the ultimate source of status and rank.
Yeah.
So when old, crusty old traditionalists like me, who like the...
Who like the old school church, you know, maybe a bit of Smells and Bells possibly, but certainly the Cranmer prayer book and...
I mean, I can't abide.
Oh my God, Tom.
I went to the leavers service.
My daughter was leaving my old school.
And...
All the parents turn up, and we have our father...
I can't even speak the new version, our father who is in heaven or whatever.
Well, obviously all change is bad.
I had to say, I had to sort of say loudly over whatever bollocks they had printed on the service sheet, our father, which art in heaven, hallowed be thy name, thy kingdom come.
And I was thinking, if you really want to piss off, if you want to guarantee that people like me don't give any money to the school...
Here's how to do it.
So anyway, that's by the by.
What do you say to people who would like to go to church more often, but only if it's the old school church?
And people who, like me, who think it's now been taken over by Gaia worship.
Are these Gaia worshippers, in a way, well, manifesting Christianity in its true modern form?
I mean, let's come to that in a minute.
More generally, the kind of what you might describe as kind of wishy-washy thought for the day.
Yes, can't bear it.
Kill them all.
Vote liberal democratic form of Christianity.
We are living through a kind of ideological upheaval that bears comparison with the Protestant Reformation.
And what happened in the Protestant Reformation is that people, is that, say, priests, scholars, people in the universities...
Have to adjust to a new way of understanding the Christian inheritance.
And if you don't, then you become an outsider and ultimately you risk being executed as a kind of Catholic recusant.
I think that what's happening now is that the long centuries of Protestant England Right.
Where the prestige that previously had attached to Protestant Christianity is now attached to a kind of post-Protestant Christianity.
And just as Catholics in the Reformation had to kind of either accommodate themselves or convert themselves to the new form of the faith or go into a kind of impure.
embittered opposition.
Yeah.
So the same thing is now is happening with, with the, the, the Protestant churches and of course with Catholic church as well, but let's stick with Protestant churches.
So, so the, either you resist it and you, you know, you proudly use the book of, you know, Cramer and, and, and, and, and King James version and, Am I weird?
No, I'm not weird.
Or you kind of accommodate to it and effectively you kind of sign up to the New Orthodoxy and you talk in a way that...
And ultimately, you know, there's no need for you really to be a practicing Christian at all, because, you know, you might as well be a Liberal Democrat councillor.
So I think that the churches have lost self-confidence.
I think they've lost any sense of authority.
I think they've lost...
The kind of certitude that in previous generations enabled them to speak with prophetic voices.
I don't think they do that anymore.
I think that they feel kind of a vague sense of embarrassment.
I mean, not everyone, of course, but I think that's a kind of slight paralyzing sense at the moment.
Now, there was something...
Oh, yes, environmentalism.
So I do think that there is a huge tension...
Between environmentalism and humanism, and generally they get conflated.
If you're a humanist, then you're also likely to be an environmentalist.
Humanism is clearly Christian.
Humanism is basically Christianity without Christ because it's founded on the idea that humans are special and that's a theological notion and it goes back to the book of Genesis and the idea that God created man and woman in his image.
And that affords an incredible dignity to humans.
I mean, there's no other belief system that offers anything like that to humans.
And to say that humans have a special status, that you can have something called humanism, is clearly drawing on that, even if humanists don't necessarily want to acknowledge that.
Against that, environmentalism is founded on the conviction that humans are bad for the planet, and increasingly bad for the planet, and that we are poisoning it, and we're wiping out vast numbers of species, have wiped out vast numbers of species, that there are too many of us.
That we're spreading everywhere.
And probably the best thing for the planet would be if we'd never existed.
And that being so, perhaps we should all just, you know, wipe ourselves out.
You've summed it up pretty well.
So there is clearly a tension there between the notion that humans are great and the kind of implicit idea that we're all a plague.
And so the way that this is squared is to...
It's to try and campaign for the reduction of human influence on the planet without facing up to the obvious way to reduce human influence on the planet, which is to wipe out humanity.
Well, some of them do.
Some of them do.
Voluntary human extinction movement.
And so there is always the chance that environmentalism will fade into a kind of Nazi-style or pagan-style in which the idea that humans do have a special status is overturned.
Nature, other species, they come to seem more important and humanity is cast as a kind of plague, which is powerfully and fundamentally opposite to the Christian perspective.
But it's kind of testimony to the enduring hold of Christianity and its assumptions on people who live in the West that there's not much uptake for that.
I mean, clearly there are people on the fringes of the Green Movement who do think that, but they are...
Seen as problematic.
It would delight you, Tom, given what you said earlier, to know, if you don't know already, that the Nazis were fanatically green.
Yes.
A lot of the idea.
Absolutely.
Yes, they were.
And they were able to be...
You know, their distinctive form of green was a very pagan and post-human one.
Post-humanist one.
Yeah.
Because, of course, the Nazis absolutely...
At the heart of their philosophy, their sense of what was good, was a conscious repudiation of the two great moral fundamentals of Christianity.
One, that all human beings are created in the image of God, that there's a fundamental equality among humans.
The Nazis say, no, not at all.
Actually, there is Greek and Jew.
Yeah.
And the Jews are a lower form and we should have no compunction about getting rid of them because their other thing that they reject is the idea that the weak have, or the oppressed or the tortured, have any claim on the strong and they say, no, the strong should do what they like.
And so in a sense, I think that's what's enabled Christian morals and values to endure as effectively as it has, even though the habit of Christian worship and faith has faded.
Because the West is haunted by a kind of subliminal understanding of what happens when Christianity goes, because we've seen it with the Nazis.
We know what happens when you get rid of the idea that all humans are created in the image of God.
And we know what happens when you get rid of the idea that the weak have a kind of have rights which they can claim against the strong because we've seen it in the form of Nazism.
So what's happened is that we no longer need the devil because we have Hitler.
And we no longer need hell because we have Auschwitz.
And we no longer need heretics because we have Nazis.
And I think that that explains the readiness of people who are essentially promoting Christian values and assumptions without Christian belief to level the charge of Nazi at almost anyone who disagrees with them.
That's very interesting.
I think you're absolutely spot on as well.
Thank you very much.
I mean, the use of Nazi and Hitler, everything being literally, everything I don't like is Hitler, has become such a trope of the last 20 years.
Yes, but it's, and I think that it's coincided with the kind of ongoing retreat of confessional Christianity.
Yeah.
But it kind of begs a question, which is, what if people turn around and say, yeah, and...
What recourse then do you have to say, well, we should care for the weak, or all human beings are equal?
Because if you don't have the theological justification that's provided by Christian myth, by Christian theodicy, by the great inheritance of writings from the church...
What recourse do you have to justify that?
If someone turns around and says, well, actually, I'm a massive racist and I think we should kill all the Jews.
How do you, beyond saying, well, you're a Nazi, and then they turn around and say, yeah, I'm a Nazi.
What does you do?
What recourse do you have?
I'm...
You and I both spend time on Twitter.
I probably get given a harder time than you because I'm more...
Right-wing.
Yeah, right-wing, whatever.
I'm less emollient, I think.
I think it would be hard to be...
Yeah, less of a kind of greaser.
Really nasty, personal, aggressive stuff, full of hate.
I'm surprised by how often, when you look at the identity of the person tweeting it, they're a self-professed Christian, or a Quaker, or one of those Buddhists, you know, the ones that do the kind of, you know...
Buddhism, not my thing.
No, no.
But, yeah, not that kind of real, not the Oriental Buddhism, but the kind of Japanese-y one where they...
So, well, whatever.
Anyway, but I'm just, it strikes me as odd, the number of Christian, of self-professed Christians out there who really don't understand the basics of Christianity.
Well, it goes back to the paradox at the heart of Christianity that you feel that you are right and so therefore you have the right to, you know, indeed, you know, Christ says go out and spread the gospel to corners of the world.
Yeah.
So you feel that, you know, you have to be evangelical about it.
You have the good news and people who reject your good news, you have to try and either persuade them or kind of bully them into giving that up.
But if you push the bullying too far, if you become too assertive, if you become too domineering, then you risk becoming, you know, you're not Christ.
You're the Roman soldiers who were taking Christ out and letting him to the cross.
And that's always the risk.
And...
The greatest, I suppose the greatest fictional meditation on that is in the short story in Dostoevsky's Brothers Karamazov, The Grand Inquisitor, where Jesus comes back, and the Grand Inquisitor, he's busy burning everyone, he arrests Jesus, and he comes into his cell and says, I know you're Jesus, but I'm still going to burn you.
Because that's always a risk.
If you feel that you're justified, if you feel that you're virtuous, that you...
You then become a bully.
One of the reasons why we, I think, civilizationally have always...
Even as there's been a kind of temptation always to...
Be it, you know, in the Middle Ages, inquisitors or Puritans or whoever.
I mean, essentially the kind of the stereotypes of atheists who are massively opposed to institutional Christianity.
They're kind of nightmareish figures of finger-wagging moralists telling you what you can and can't do.
So against that, also part of the fabric of Christian civilisation is A dislike of that.
And that's bred, I think, of the character of Christ himself.
Because one of the striking things about him, as he's portrayed in all the Gospels, is that you can never actually pin him down.
And whenever you think you've got him sussed, he kind of upends your expectations.
So, you know, he goes to a wedding and he turns everything into wine and they all have an enormous party.
That's cool, isn't it?
Or, you know, I mean, he's kind of...
A woman goes and blows an enormous amount of money on buying him a kind of very expensive foot ointment.
And the disciples say, shouldn't you have spent that on the poor?
And Jesus says, well, you'll always have the poor with you, but you won't have me for long.
Get on with the rubbing of the ointment.
And it's Jesus who refers to the virtuous as white and sepulchres.
The figures of priests, the figures of the moralists as white and sepulchres.
And that's a really powerful idea that actually...
It's among the prostitutes and the tax collectors that Jesus hangs out with.
He doesn't hang out with the equivalent of people who harass you.
He's got to be among the figures from history that one would have liked to meet.
Well, I'd love to meet him because I'd love to know whether he in any way corresponds to the image of him that we have in the Gospels.
But I mean, for what it's worth, and I don't say this with any kind of certainty, it's just my gut instinct.
My personal feeling is that the figure of Jesus in the Gospels is so remarkable that I think that he must in some way reflect God.
People's understanding of who the historical Jesus had been and I imagine that Jesus as he went round preaching much like a politician now who you know with his sound bites so that if you're a you know a political correspondent following Theresa May you know she's going to say strong and stable and people will be talking about strong and stable in 40 years time So I think in a similar way,
Jesus, I'm not comparing Jesus to Theresa May, by the way, but he probably had certain shout lines, he had certain parables, certain stories, certain way of presenting what he wanted to say that became so well-oiled, so well-grooved that people who followed him...
It just became part of the fabric of what they talked about, and that basically is what is copied down in the Gospels.
I have no way of proving that, because we lack the proof, but it's my assumption.
And if that's the case, then Jesus must indeed have been a remarkable figure.
And I think he must, in a way, you have to explain why...
People thought that he was what he was.
And they think this pretty much right from the beginning, based on the evidence of Paul's letters.
Because, well, Paul is a very argumentative figure.
He's always kind of firing off letters, kind of bollocking the Galatians.
Yeah.
Telling the Corinthians off or whatever.
What he never feels any need to tell them is that Jesus rose from the dead and that he is in some way part of...
An aspect of the one God.
Both these things are very odd things for everyone to think, but they all clearly seem to think it.
It must be based in some sense on both the understanding that Jesus was...
An unprecedented figure like no one that anyone had ever met, and that their belief that he had risen from the dead.
I mean, it seems the most plausible explanation doesn't mean that he did rise from the dead, but I think that people must have thought that he'd risen from the dead, and I suspect that they thought it pretty much from the beginning.
Has it made you more Christian, researching this book?
Well, I was brought up Anglican, but I kind of had a very Victorian-style crisis of faith when I was six, because I was obsessed by dinosaurs.
You can probably see I've actually got a dinosaur on my t-shirt.
And I had an illustrated Bible which showed Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, but also showed a brachiosaur.
And if there's one thing I knew at six, it was that humans had not coexisted with brachiosaur.
And so I asked the Sunday school teacher and said, what's going on here?
And she didn't seem to have a problem.
She didn't seem to understand even what the issue was.
And it was a kind of blinding mode.
Every child has it where you suddenly realise that not only the adults don't know everything, but you know something that an adult doesn't.
And the failure of the Sunday school teacher...
And acceptably and adequately to have contemplated how dinosaurs were to be fitted into the biblical narrative caused me enormous problems.
And so there's always been a kind of shadow right from the beginning of that.
And I wouldn't say that I ever had a kind of blinding moment where I lost my faith.
I always had a kind of deep respect for the model of Christianity provided for me by my mother and by other people who I love very much.
But it just kind of faded away like a dimmer light being slowly turned down.
But the experience I mentioned about...
Partly it's been the process of over the past 20 years realising that in almost every way what I think and believe and value is Christian.
It doesn't come from Greece.
It doesn't come from Rome really.
It comes from the course of Christian history.
But also, that experience I mentioned about contemplating the crucifixion in Sinjar, I felt it viscerally.
I felt it as something that lay far beyond the dimensions of the rational.
And I experienced it, I think, as a kind of myth that I felt to be true.
And I think that if, on that level, I would have to count myself Christian, I think.
Yeah.
I've experienced it through, when I went to Mertathos and stayed in some of the monasteries there.
And there was one I remember, I think it was either Russian Orthodox or Ukrainian Orthodox monastery, and there was a Father Seraphim who greeted me at the gate.
And he was just, he was so obviously a holy man.
Shining with faith.
So the lack of women, James?
Well, we haven't talked about...
That wasn't...
You and I would have been very happy in the Sacred Band, wouldn't we?
Dying for our lovers.
Our male lovers.
I think that membership of the Sacred Band would certainly have been an aspiration had I lived in Thebes when it was being formed.
I'm going to wrap it up now, Tom, because actually I'm thinking...
There's loads of stuff we haven't even touched on because we've just been talking about your book.
We haven't talked about hedgehogs.
We haven't talked about Stonehenge and the tunnel.
We haven't caught up on the news.
We haven't had a...
The discussion we should have had, we haven't, is how come you can be friends on Twitter with me and simultaneously with people like Simon Sharma.
You are very rare.
Because I'm such a nice person, James.
I don't think you are a nice person, actually.
I think you're a...
An oily creep.
Oily creep, yeah.
It's because I'm an oily creep.
We haven't revisited vampires.
There's loads of stuff.
So much.
So I think what...
We haven't talked about the rivalry or not with your brother.
No rivalry.
Okay.
A massive synergy.
Well, that's a bit of a boring...
Yes.
That's going to make a boring podcast, you know.
I just pray I'll just kill that.
Why I love my...
Yeah, but there's other stuff we haven't talked about.
I mean, obviously the Romans are better than the Nazis, but, I mean, that's essentially the only rivalry.
Didn't they are?
Yeah.
Loads better.
Because they've lasted longer.
They've lasted longer, more glamorous, better buildings.
I mean, the Nazis are just trying to rip them off.
Yeah, Nazis.
What did they know?
Rubbish.
Rubbish.
Okay, so I think that's the end of this one, but you're going to come back, aren't you?
Yes, absolutely.
Thank you very much.
You've invited me.
And I know you're going to do lots of other interviews to promote your book.
Is this the best one you'll do?
Oh, undoubtedly.
From the horse's mouth.
Thank you.
Listen to the Delling Poll with me, James Leffler.
Don't forget, by the way, before we end, October the 5th, the London Podcast Live Festival with Dick and me.
We're going to have games and fun and it's going to be your first chance to buy membership of Club Delling Poll with the special badge in the shape of a red pill.
You can't not come.
Thank you very much.
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