Courtney McGrail“The Bible is the first text to represent victimisation from the standpoint of the victim, and it is this representation which is responsible, ultimately, for our own superior sensibility to violence,” according to the late French philosopher-anthropologist René Girard, observing with reference to some of the Bible’s more violent passages that, “it is for biblical reasons, paradoxically, that we criticise the Bible”.
Girard’s observation springs to mind when reading historian Tom Holland’s latest article at newstatesman.com, ‘Why I was wrong about Christianity’, in which he describes how childhood doubts about Christianity blended with a fascination with such biblical antagonists as the Egyptians, the Assyrians and the Romans to prepare the ground for a later sympathy with Enlightenment attacks on Christianity.
Superstition
“By the time I came to read Edward Gibbon and the other great writers of the Enlightenment,” he says, “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.”
Since then, of course, Holland has gone on to forge an impressive career as a popular historian; his most famous work may be In the Shadow of the Sword, his fascinating investigation of the origins of Islam, but his most frequent field of study has been ancient Greece and Rome, whether through such histories as Rubicon, Dynasty and Persian Fire, or through his energetic translation of Herodotus’ Histories.
Antiquity
“The longer I spent immersed in the study of classical antiquity, the more alien and unsettling I came to find it,” he now admits, continuing, “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.”
We too easily sanctify Greece and Rome when talking of them as seedbeds of the West, painting them as luminous sources of democracy, philosophy, and so much else, making Holland’s willingness to confront their dark side all the more startling – and the three examples he gives barely scratch a sinister surface that gives the lie to modern boasts that altruism is hardwired into us.
“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,” he continues, “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.”
Rejecting Voltaire’s attempt to derive his ethical principles from any source other than the Christian culture in which he’d been raised, Holland observes that “Voltaire, in his concern for the weak and oppressed, was marked more enduringly by the stamp of biblical ethics than he cared to admit”, continuing, in a Girardian echo, “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.”
Punishment
Noting of the Crucifixion that “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”, Holland says that even now we in the West bear the marks of our Christian heritage as rooted in the example and teaching of Christ and his apostles.
“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,” he argues, continuing, “It is why we generally assume that every human life is of equal value.”
It’s a fine and thoughtful essay, and one that invites an obvious question: how long can a post-Christian society live off its Christian capital?