#406 — The Legacy of Christianity

Sam Harris speaks with Tom Holland about his book, Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World https://amzn.to/4i9eoky. They discuss the enduring influence of Christianity on the modern world, historical interpretations of crucifixion, the moral systems of ancient societies, Paul's letters, the impact of the parable of the Good Samaritan, Islam and how it relates to Christian notions of morality, secular sources of morality, the collision between Western norms and traditional Islam, how Western societies take their values for granted, the relevance of the Roman Republic and the French Revolution, and other topics. If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe http://samharris.org/subscribe. Learning how to train your mind is the single greatest investment you can make in life. That's why Sam Harris created the Waking Up https://www.wakingup.com/makingsense app. From rational mindfulness practice to lessons on some of life's most important topics, join Sam as he demystifies the practice of meditation and explores the theory behind it.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:06Sam Harris?

  Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you're not currently on our subscriber feed, and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense Podcast, you'll need to subscribe at samharris.org. There you'll also find our scholarship program, where we offer free accounts to anyone who can't afford one. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one.

• 0:45Sam Harris?

  I'm here with Tom Holland. Tom, thanks for joining me.

• 0:48Speaker 01

  Thank you for having me.

• 0:49Sam Harris?

  I'm a huge fan of your work. I have known about your books for some years, but I recently discovered your podcast, which you do with Dominic Sandbrook, a fellow historian, which is fantastic. The rest is history. I am working my way through Dominion, which is fantastic. And this came out a few years ago, but I'm well into it. And it's also great as an audiobook, which people should know.

• 1:15Speaker 01

  Well, Sam, if I could just say also, I'm just in the process of recording it myself.

• 1:19Sam Harris?

  Oh, nice.

• 1:20Speaker 01

  So I've just been doing that today.

• 1:21Sam Harris?

  Okay, good.

• 1:22Speaker 01

  So I've just come back from the recording studio.

• 1:23Sam Harris?

  So don't get the audiobook. Wait for Tom to record it.

• 1:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, just wait.

• 1:26Sam Harris?

  Yeah, that's interesting. So yeah, I don't know if you find that as painful a process as I do, but it's surprisingly hard.

• 1:33Speaker 01

  I'm actually, I'm finding it very painful.

• 1:34Sam Harris?

  Yeah.

• 1:35Speaker 01

  Very painful indeed.

• 1:36Sam Harris?

  I've actually had to rewrite lines that I couldn't get through. I'd inadvertently written tongue twisters for myself. And after 20 takes in front of an Ashenface producer, I literally have to change the language so that I can neurologically accomplish the task. You've written about ancient Rome, Christianity, as I said, as I said in Dominion, which we'll focus on. But you've also covered the origins of Islam and the problem of jihadism in the West. I just discovered as late as last night, the short documentary.

• 2:10Sam Harris?

  You did on ISIS, the Islamic State, which was quite something to revisit. It's amazing how the memory of the extremity of that horror has faded for even people who have focused on it at the time. It was just such a ghastly distillation of everything that's wrong with that fanaticism, which we'll talk about. So anyway, there's a ton to cover and I really want to get your sense as a historian of the echoes of history that we're seeing in the present. I mean, so much of the history that you've covered on your podcast, you have a great series on the French Revolution. I think we're hearing echoes of that in recent years, echoes of the fall of Rome and other concerns. Also, before we started, you told

• 2:54Sam Harris?

  me you have a new translation of Suetonius's Lives of the Caesars coming out in April, which people should look for, which I didn't realize you're a translator. You translated Herodotus back in the day and I look forward to picking that up. So anyway, that's a long introduction. Tom, welcome to the podcast.

• 3:11Speaker 01

  Thanks very much for having me.

• 3:12Sam Harris?

  So let's start with the thesis in Dominion, the argument that Christianity is the most enduring legacy of the ancient world and that many of us who think we were never really indoctrinated in it or by it certainly don't imagine ourselves to be attached to it. An outspoken atheist like myself imagines that his morality was not actually handed to him by Jesus or Paul or medieval Christendom or the Bible thumpers in my own country with whom I'm even more familiar. You argue that so much of what we take to be natural to us in secular moral

• 3:55Sam Harris?

  terms is really the legacy of Christian ethics. So let's jump in. I don't mean to lead the witness too much, but let's just start with what accounts for the rise and endurance of Christianity on your account.

• 4:09Speaker 01

  Well, the rise, I, nothing comes from nothing. So it is clearly emerges from a confluence of all kinds of, of different cultural streams. The most obvious of those, of course, is the inheritance of, of Hebrew scripture. Jesus is saturated in that, Paul and, and, and the first Christians as well. But there is also the influence of Greece, Greek culture, Greek philosophy. Paul writes in Greek and he invokes Greek philosophical concepts and indeed infuses them into his letters.

• 4:51Speaker 01

  I think that you can discern more distantly because it is an influence on Hebrew scripture rather than directly on the world of the early church. Persian dualism, the sense that the world and the cosmos is a moral entity, that there are such concepts as good and evil, which the Persians would define as truth and the lie, as light and darkness. And then, of course, there is the context that is provided by the Roman Empire, which is very self-consciously universalist.

• 5:29Speaker 01

  Virgil, Rome's greatest poet, claims that the Romans have been given empire without limit by the gods. And the physical manifestations of that assumption are the great roads that are starting to be cast like a, you know, the, the mesh of a net over the various provinces that the Romans have conquered. The shipping lanes have been largely cleared from pirates. And so the world has been joined together in a way that it had never previously been.

• 6:02Speaker 01

  Christianity emerges as in a way that is very conscious of that, that kind of universal dimension. And Paul in this, I think, is the key figure, a Judean, raised with a deep knowledge of, of the scriptures, but also he has a very, very keen awareness of the vastness of the world. And in a sense, he gives to the non Judeans in the Roman Empire, a chance to share in what have already been discerned by many Gentiles as the, the kind

• 6:41Speaker 01

  of the spiritual and scriptural riches of the Judean inheritance. And I, I think in that context, you can see why Christianity would be as successful as it is, because it is absorbing all kinds of elements that are culturally present in the world of the Roman Mediterranean and mixing them in a way that proves very appealing to large numbers of people across the, the Roman Mediterranean and indeed beyond the Roman Mediterranean into the, into the lands of, of the Persians as well.

• 7:18Sam Harris?

  But isn't the, the appeal still somewhat paradoxical? I mean, this is something that I think you cover in your book, and it's a point that I think Paul made and Nietzsche also made. I mean, I think those are, Paul and Nietzsche could be the, considered the bookends of Christianity, but both acknowledged how astounding it was that a living God was crucified and that somehow this abject failure within his lifetime to conquer anything became the symbol that so much of the world found spiritually inspiring, right? I mean, they, they, there had been this historical precedent of various kings and other figures

• 8:02Sam Harris?

  being acknowledged to be divine, right? Becoming divine at some point in their lives or just, you know, claiming to be divine. And, and yet they're not the center of a 2000 year old cult or, or, you know, worldwide religion. So, so let's linger for a moment just on the, on the strangeness of the Jesus story.

• 8:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's incredibly strange. And as you say, the strangeness is not the idea that a man can in some way also be divine, because most people in the Roman world take that for granted. And in fact, the fastest growing cult in the first century A D is not Christianity, but the cult of another man who was thought to be the son of a god, who proclaimed good news, who claimed to rule over an age of peace, and who, when he died, was believed to have ascended to heaven to sit at the right hand of his father. And this is Caesar Augustus, the man who rules effectively as the first

• 9:03Speaker 01

  emperor, the son of Julius Caesar, who brings peace to a world that had been ravaged by civil war. And the achievements of Augustus are what raise him to the heavens. The Romans, and indeed many in the provinces, feel that his achievements are of a divine order. The idea that someone who not, it's not just that that Jesus was an unimportant provincial from a backwater, but the fact that he had suffered a peculiarly horrible death. Crucifixion was the paradigmatic fate that was visited on slaves, because it was not

• 9:44Speaker 01

  only agonizing, but it was also publicly humiliating. And in a sense, humiliation for the Romans was seen as being almost more terrible than physical pain. And you're right that, in a sense, Paul and Nietzsche do kind of bookend this sense, because in Paul's letters, again and again, you get a sense of utter shock that this could have happened. Paul's letters are not kind of a cool, measured articulation of doctrine. He is wrestling with a sense of overwhelming astonishment that, in some way, the one

• 10:25Speaker 01

  god of Israel has been made manifest as someone who suffered this hideous death, and it kind of blows His mind and he's endlessly trying to make sense of it. I think what then happens over the course of the of the of the Christian centuries that follow is that it takes Christians a long time to get over the shock and horror of this. It's really notable that through the early centuries, Christians do feel, yeah, this is embarrassing. I mean, they they they they feel they they continue to feel unsettled by it. And even once Constantine has become a Christian and the Roman Empire starts to become institutionally christianized, this sense of embarrassment remains and.

• 11:10Sam Harris?

  I think you say in the book, this is a fact that had never occurred to me to even wonder about, but it took some centuries before the depiction of Christ on the cross became really admissible.

• 11:23Speaker 01

  Right. So, I mean, one of the earliest ones that is done by, so there's a very early one that is done by someone mocking Christianity. So it shows a man with an ass's head being crucified. It comes from graffiti in Rome and it's clearly mockery. One of the earliest illustrations by Christians comes on an ivory box that's now in the British Museum and it it shows the passion. So on one side you have Judas being hanged and looking very unhappy about it. On the other side, you have Christ on the cross and he couldn't look more chilled. I mean, he looks, well, he looks like he's hanging out in California on a beach. He's buff, he's toned, he's got a kind of loincloth on.

• 12:07Speaker 01

  And in fact, what he looks like, of course, is an athlete who has won in a great contest, which is one of the ways that in the Roman world, Christ's victory over death is understood. And it's not for another 500 years after that, so just before the the first millennium, that you get Christ portrayed as some as as dead on the cross. And then throughout the High Middle Ages, there is a very deep and intense fascination on the part of Christians with the physical sufferings of Christ, with his passion. And then I think people, artists and thinkers and writers in the Christian world push it to such a limit that almost they become desensitized to it.

• 12:53Speaker 01

  And by the 19th century, when Nietzsche is writing, I think that most people probably going into a church and looking at a cross. Are not thinking of it as an absolutely hideous instrument of torture and they're probably not visualizing the appalling sufferings that that a man nailed to it would have undergone. And it it it's kind of paradox, a very Nietzschean paradox, that probably the most devastate, you know, to Christian faith, the most devastating atheism ever written in the Christian tradition, Friedrich Nietzsche, should have felt the power of the cross so profoundly and he feels it as something disgusting. He feels it perhaps in the sense that a Greek or Roman would.

• 13:37Speaker 01

  The idea that that someone who had suffered such a servile fate could in any way be worthy of approbation, let alone worship appalls Nietzsche because he sees it as an offence against the values of strength and power and glory and beauty that he identifies in Greek and Roman culture and which frankly, he thinks has been corrupted by Christianity, this faith of slaves, as he describes it. And one of the reasons he describes it as a faith of slaves is because crucifixion is the fate that is visited on slaves. And I, when I was writing Dominion, I was about two chapters through and then I got a commission

• 14:20Speaker 01

  to make this film that you mentioned in your introduction about the Islamic State. And I ended up going to this town called Sinjar, which had been the home of people called the Yazidis. I'm sure you'll know, I'm sure lots of people listening will know, people who were accused by the Islamic State, not just of of being infidels, but of being devil worshippers and had been treated peculiarly horribly. And the women had been rounded up and those who were thought too ugly to take off as sex slaves had been killed and those who hadn't had been taken off and and sold into sexual slavery. But the men, some of them had been crucified. And to be in a town that had been liberated just a few weeks before by the Kurds and the Islamic State were a couple of miles away from where

• 15:04Speaker 01

  we were across kind of blank, open fields, to be in a town where people had suffered crucifixion at the hands of people who viewed crucifixion as the Romans had viewed it as a fate that it was not just the right of the powerful to visit on the defeated, but a moral duty, I found kind of existentially horrible. And it, I suppose it, it kind of opened my mind to the sense in which I think the idea that someone who is tortured to death has a moral value over the person who tortures him to death, underpins my moral system and I think the moral system of the vast

• 15:49Speaker 01

  number of people in the West. And I came back and I rewrote the introduction to the book to focus on the crucifixion as being the kind of maddest, strangest, weirdest symbol that anyone in antiquity came up with. And it may not be a coincidence that it is, of course, the most enduring symbol, probably the best known symbol maybe in, in world history.

• 16:15Sam Harris?

  Yeah, one thing you get from reading history, certainly reading Dominion, or your other, I guess Rubicon conveys it to your discussion of Rome. It's just how foreign and through a modern lens pathological the ethics of antiquity were, right? I think, is it the Sisyphus who said that the, the, the strong do what they will and the, the weak suffer what they must? Or some, that's probably close to the translation?

• 16:45Speaker 01

  A phrase that is being quoted a lot at the moment, it must be said.

• 16:48Sam Harris?

  And yeah, I mean, so you actually make that point in your, in your documentary on, on the Islamic State as you're walking through Sinjar, that, that this was a promulgation of, of a Roman ethic, essentially. I mean, I think you, you say something like they, they murdered these people very much the way, you know, the Roman legions would have, or there's some, some line like that, direct comparison to Rome, which I found briefly shocking because I realize I rarely view the Greeks and Romans through this, this lens of, of moral judgment. The same kind of judgment I, I lavish upon jihadists, right? But yet there, there's something awful about their, their ethics and their, their celebration of strength over weakness.

• 17:36Speaker 01

  I mean, that is a perspective that I would argue is shaped by 2,000 years of Christian weathering, because, I mean, Nietzsche certainly saw

• 17:46Sam Harris?

  Yeah.

• 17:46Speaker 01

  the morality of the Greeks and the Romans as something admirable, as of course, in due course, did Hitler.

• 17:52Sam Harris?

  Yeah.

• 17:53Speaker 01

  But it's, it's, I mean, it's wrong to say that the Romans are are immoral. They, they weren't at all. They saw themselves as the most moral of peoples, and this is why the gods had given them the rule of the world. And

• 18:04Sam Harris?

  Well, so you read like the Stoic philosophers, right? And it's you're, you're in the presence of some of the greatest wisdom philosophy has ever produced. And yet, to know of, of the normalcy of crucifixion occurring in the background is peculiar.

• 18:20Speaker 01

  I mean, I think, so as a child, I always found Greece and Rome infinitely more glamorous than, than the, than the Israelites and than the, and than the apostles. So I was always team Pharaoh, team Nebuchadnezzar, team Pontius Pilate. I kind of thrilled to the glamour and the swagger of these ancient civilizations, rather in the way that I'd thrilled to the, the glamour and the swagger of tyrannosaurs as an even younger child. And I guess that I was perfectly capable of being thrilled and excited by the thought of the Spartans

• 18:59Speaker 01

  at Thermopylae, or Caesar conquering Gaul. And I would do that in part by also identifying my moral inheritance as something that derived from Greek philosophy.

• 19:11Sam Harris?

  Hmm.

• 19:11Speaker 01

  But I guess that one of the, well, actually, probably the main thing that led me to write Dominion, A History of Christianity, which I had, had, had never been on my agenda. I always viewed, I had a kind of almost synesthetic sense of antiquity. And I thought of Greece and Rome as with bright blue Californian skies. And I thought of Christianity as, you know, the drizzle of an English autumn setting in and blotting out the sun. But I realized as I wrote about Caesar, who was hailed as a great man by his fellow citizens for inflicting hundreds of thousands of casualties on, in during the course of the conquest of Gaul,

• 19:54Speaker 01

  enslaving an equal number and kind of exulting in it, and realizing that this really wasn't my moral system at all. And I began, I felt it was kind of like, you know, I suppose the kind of the prickled in the back of the throat that heralds the onset of a cold, the sense that that something was kind of, that I had, couldn't quite get a handle on was, was waiting to, to take me over. And I began to think, well, is it actually Christianity that changes? Is that, is that what explains the, the, the process of transformation? And I explored it in the third work of history I wrote, which was focused very much on what I think is

• 20:36Speaker 01

  a kind of great process of revolution in 11th century Latin Christendom, so the Western half of what had been the Roman Empire. And it's often called the Papal Revolution because the revolutionaries are people who take control of the Roman Church and it's led by popes. And it, it forces through a kind of very radical process of a recalibration of society that essentially divides the world into rival spheres that in due course in the West is what, what we call religion and the secular. And this is a, a division that did not exist in antiquity. It didn't exist in any other of the civilizations of Eurasia. And I enjoyed

• 21:21Speaker 01

  the paradox that, that secularism would not probably have been secularism without the labors of 11th century popes. It seemed to be a very entertaining paradox. So I explored that. And then, and then on the back of that, I then became interested in what was the role of Islam in all of this. And I, I wrote a book on Islam where I was quite skeptical about, quite a lot about early Islam. I,

• 21:47Sam Harris?

  This is in the shadow of the sword?

• 21:49Speaker 01

  In the shadow of the sword. So it seemed to me that the, the great question about Islam is where does the Quran come from? And it is amazing, the number of books by very distinguished scholars, so it's not even kind of popular history, who will say about the revelations Mohammed received.

• 22:09Sam Harris?

  From the Archangel Gabriel? That's the scholarly opinion of the Academy?

• 22:14Speaker 01

  They don't say that, but they they might say he received the revelations and they leave it at that. And I thought, well, that's not really an adequate explanation if you're not a Muslim. I mean, if you're a Muslim, then of course it's perfectly adequate. I mean, you know, that's the foundation of of a Muslim's faith. But if you're not, you've got to say, where does it come from? And it did seem to me that the Quran was, I mean, if the Quran had materialized in, I don't know, 15th century New Zealand, I mean, that would be a miracle. It would be incredible. But the fact that it materializes in a place that is rife with Jewish and Christian and Zoroastrian and Roman and Persian and all kinds of cultural influences and that this

• 22:56Speaker 01

  is exactly what it reflects, made me think that that Islam was a product of this, but one that had gone on a, you know, a radically different direction from from Christianity. And so so thinking that and studying it and kind of reifying my thoughts about how what today we would call Judaism and Christianity and Islam and Zoroastrianism were kind of related, but quite radically different in their presumptions, again, sharpened for me the sense of what was distinctive about Christianity and my own sense of being very, very shaped by it. And so that's how I then came to write Dominion. And Dominion was a

• 23:37Speaker 01

  process of stress testing that theory, because when I began it, I wasn't entirely sure what conclusions I would I would end up with.

• 23:45Sam Harris?

  Well, I want to get to Islam, as I said, but let's linger here on the connection that you argue for between Christian ethics and secular ethics that many of us imagine to be, you know, quite denuded of any, you know, propositional claim about the the truth or or necessity of Christianity. Someone like myself, I move through the world having various moral intuitions informed by just my own thought and then just my collision with the the history of ideas, whether it's Western philosophy or Eastern philosophy or or religions like Christianity. But that amalgam translates, in my thinking, into something that is, has no necessary connection, certainly, to Christianity.

• 24:28Sam Harris?

  So let me just throw a few, or try to create a few wrinkles in that picture. One is that, so, when you take Christianity itself, the early Christians, you know, from Jesus onward, first of all, they were Jews. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe at samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full-length episodes of the Making Sense Podcast. The podcast is available to everyone through our scholarship program, so if you can't afford a subscription, please request a free account on the website. The Making Sense Podcast is ad-free and relies entirely on listener support, and you can subscribe now at samharris.org.