Making Sense - Sam Harris - #406 — The Legacy of Christianity

00:00:00.000 Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if

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00:00:45.400 I'm here with Tom Holland. Tom, thanks for joining me.

00:00:48.700 Thank you for having me.

00:00:49.480 I'm a huge fan of your work. I have known about your books for some years, but I recently

00:00:54.680 discovered your podcast, which you do with Dominic Sandbrook, a fellow historian, which

00:00:59.000 is fantastic. The rest is history. I am working my way through Dominion, which is fantastic.

00:01:06.720 And this came out a few years ago, but I'm well into it. And it's also great as an audiobook,

00:01:12.460 which people should know.

00:01:15.400 Well, Sam, if I could just say also, I'm just in the process of recording it myself.

00:01:19.900 Oh, nice.

00:01:20.160 So I've just been doing that today.

00:01:21.600 Okay, good.

00:01:22.320 So I've just come back from the recording studio.

00:01:23.440 So don't get the audiobook. Wait for Tom to record it.

00:01:26.300 Yeah. Yeah. That's interesting. So yeah, I mean, I don't know if you'll find that as

00:01:30.200 painful a process as I do, but it's surprisingly hard.

00:01:33.720 I'm finding it very painful.

00:01:35.020 Yeah.

00:01:35.480 Very painful indeed.

00:01:36.640 I've actually had to rewrite lines that I couldn't get through. I'd inadvertently written

00:01:40.980 tongue twisters for myself. And after 20 takes in front of an ashen-faced producer,

00:01:45.820 I literally have to change the language so that I can neurologically accomplish the task.

00:01:50.700 You've written about ancient Rome, Christianity, as I said, and Dominion, which we'll focus on.

00:01:58.840 But you've also covered the origins of Islam and the problem of jihadism in the West. I discovered

00:02:05.600 as late as last night, the short documentary you did on ISIS, the Islamic State, which was

00:02:13.280 quite something to revisit. It's amazing how the memory of the extremity of that horror has faded for

00:02:19.940 even people who have focused on it at the time. It was just such a ghastly distillation of everything

00:02:26.160 that's wrong with that fanaticism, which we'll talk about. So anyway, there's a ton to cover.

00:02:31.540 And I really want to get your sense as a historian of the echoes of history that we're seeing in the

00:02:39.340 present. I mean, so much of the history that you've covered on your podcast, you have a great

00:02:44.480 series on the French Revolution. I think we're hearing echoes of that in recent years, echoes of

00:02:49.920 the fall of Rome and other concerns. Also, before we started, you told me you have a new translation

00:02:55.320 of Suetonius' Lives of the Caesars coming out in April, which people should look for, which I didn't

00:03:01.300 realize you're a translator. You translated Herodotus back in the day, and I look forward to

00:03:07.580 picking that up. So anyway, that's a long introduction. Tom, welcome to the podcast.

00:03:11.200 Thanks very much for having me. So let's start with the thesis in Dominion,

00:03:16.940 the argument that Christianity is the most enduring legacy of the ancient world, and that

00:03:22.320 many of us who think we were never really indoctrinated in it or by it certainly don't

00:03:29.280 imagine ourselves to be attached to it. An outspoken atheist like myself imagines that

00:03:35.320 his morality was not actually handed to him by Jesus or Paul or medieval Christendom or the Bible

00:03:43.620 thumpers in my own country, with whom I'm even more familiar. You argue that so much of what we 1.00

00:03:50.300 take to be natural to us in secular moral terms is really the legacy of Christian ethics. So let's

00:04:00.460 jump in. I don't mean to lead the witness too much, but let's just start with what accounts for

00:04:05.240 the rise and endurance of Christianity on your account.

00:04:08.780 Well, the rise, nothing comes from nothing. So it clearly emerges from a confluence of whole kinds of

00:04:20.900 different cultural streams. The most obvious of those, of course, is the inheritance of Hebrew 0.98

00:04:28.520 scripture. Jesus is saturated in that. Paul and the first Christians as well. But there is also

00:04:37.240 the influence of Greece, Greek culture, Greek philosophy. Paul writes in Greek and he invokes

00:04:45.380 Greek philosophical concepts and indeed infuses them into his letters. I think that you can discern

00:04:52.840 more distantly because it is an influence on Hebrew scripture rather than directly on the world of the

00:05:01.180 early church. Persian dualism, the sense that the world and the cosmos is a moral entity, that there are

00:05:10.620 such concepts as good and evil, which the Persians would define as truth and the lie, as light and

00:05:18.800 darkness. And then, of course, there is the context that is provided by the Roman Empire, which is very 0.86

00:05:26.520 self-consciously universalist. Virgil, Rome's greatest poet, claims that the Romans have been given

00:05:34.640 empire without limit by the gods. And the physical manifestations of that assumption are the great

00:05:43.700 roads, roads that are starting to be cast like the mesh of a net over the various provinces that the Romans 0.85

00:05:51.240 have conquered. The shipping lanes have been largely cleared from pirates. And so, the world has been joined

00:05:57.600 together in a way that it had never previously been. And Christianity emerges in a way that is very conscious of

00:06:07.280 that kind of universal dimension. And Paul in this, I think, is the key figure. A Judean raised with a deep

00:06:16.840 knowledge of the scriptures, but also he has a very, very keen awareness of the vastness of the world.

00:06:25.500 And in a sense, he gives to the non-Judeans in the Roman Empire a chance to share in what have already 1.00

00:06:36.580 been discerned by many Gentiles as the kind of the spiritual and scriptural riches of the Judean

00:06:45.320 inheritance. And I think in that context, you can see why Christianity would be as successful as it is,

00:06:55.160 because it is absorbing all kinds of elements that are culturally present in the world of the Roman

00:07:03.060 Mediterranean, and mixing them in a way that proves very appealing to large numbers of people across the

00:07:12.540 Roman Mediterranean, and indeed beyond the Roman Mediterranean into the lands of the Persians as

00:07:18.060 well.

00:07:18.800 But isn't the appeal still somewhat paradoxical? I mean, this is something that I think you cover in

00:07:25.120 your book, and it's a point that I think Paul made and Nietzsche also made. I mean, I think Paul and

00:07:32.380 Nietzsche could be considered the bookends of Christianity, but both acknowledged how astounding

00:07:39.660 it was that a living God was crucified, and that somehow this abject failure within his lifetime to

00:07:49.020 conquer anything became the symbol that so much of the world found spiritually inspiring, right? I mean,

00:07:57.800 there had been this historical precedent of various kings and other figures being acknowledged to be

00:08:04.500 divine, right? Becoming divine at some point in their lives, or just, you know, claiming to be divine,

00:08:09.920 and yet they're not the center of a 2,000-year-old cult or, you know, worldwide religion.

00:08:16.360 So let's linger for a moment just on the strangeness of the Jesus story.

00:08:22.860 Yeah, it's incredibly strange. And as you say, the strangeness is not the idea that a man can in

00:08:29.420 some way also be divine, because most people in the Roman world take that for granted. And in fact,

00:08:36.140 the fastest growing cult in the 1st century AD is not Christianity, but the cult of another man who

00:08:44.060 was thought to be the son of a god, who proclaimed good news, who claimed to rule over an age of peace,

00:08:53.340 and who, when he died, was believed to have ascended to heaven to sit at the right hand of his father.

00:08:59.320 And this is Caesar Augustus, the man who rules effectively as the first emperor, the son of

00:09:04.800 Julius Caesar, who brings peace to a world that had been ravaged by civil war. And the achievements of

00:09:11.500 Augustus are what raise him to the heavens. The Romans, and indeed many in the provinces, feel that his

00:09:17.800 achievements are of a divine order. The idea that someone who not – it's not just that Jesus was an

00:09:29.620 unimportant provincial from a backwater, but the fact that he had suffered a peculiarly horrible death.

00:09:37.840 Crucifixion was the paradigmatic fate that was visited on slaves, because it was not only agonising,

00:09:46.120 but it was also publicly humiliating. And in a sense, humiliation for the Romans was seen as being

00:09:52.660 almost more terrible than physical pain. And you're right that, in a sense, Paul and Nietzsche do

00:10:01.980 kind of bookend this sense. Because in Paul's letters, again and again, you get a sense of utter shock

00:10:08.800 that this could have happened. Paul's letters are not kind of a cool, measured articulation of doctrine.

00:10:15.960 He is wrestling with a sense of overwhelming astonishment that, in some way, the one God of Israel

00:10:26.800 Israel has been made manifest as someone who suffered this hideous death. And it kind of blows his mind,

00:10:32.980 and he's endlessly trying to make sense of it. I think what then happens over the course of the Christian

00:10:39.620 centuries that follow is that it takes Christians a long time to get over the shock and horror of this. 0.58

00:10:46.920 It's really notable that, through the early centuries, Christians do feel, yeah, this is embarrassing. 0.98

00:10:54.640 I mean, they continue to feel unsettled by it. And even once Constantine has become a Christian, 0.64

00:11:03.260 and the Roman Empire starts to become institutionally Christianized, this sense of embarrassment remains.

00:11:10.400 I think you say in the book, this is a fact that had never occurred to me to even wonder about,

00:11:14.900 but it took some centuries before the depiction of Christ on the cross became really admissible.

00:11:23.880 Right. So, I mean, one of the earliest ones that is done by, so there's a very early one that is

00:11:29.620 done by someone mocking Christianity. So it shows a man with an ass's head being crucified. It comes from 0.99

00:11:36.240 graffiti in Rome, and it's clearly mockery. One of the earliest illustrations by Christians comes on an 0.97

00:11:43.320 ivory box that's now in the British Museum, and it shows the passion. So on one side, you have Judas

00:11:49.380 being hanged and looking very unhappy about it. On the other side, you have Christ on the cross,

00:11:57.300 and he couldn't look more chilled. I mean, he looks, well, he looks like he's hanging out in California

00:12:02.580 on a beach. He's buff, he's toned, he's got a kind of loincloth on. And in fact, what he looks like,

00:12:08.540 of course, is an athlete who has won in a great contest, which is one of the ways that in the

00:12:14.000 Roman world, Christ's victory over death is understood. And it's not for another 500 years 0.59

00:12:19.860 after that, so just before the first millennium, that you get Christ portrayed as dead on the cross.

00:12:27.560 And then throughout the high Middle Ages, there is a very deep and intense fascination on the part

00:12:35.240 of Christians with the physical sufferings of Christ, with his passion. And then I think people,

00:12:42.820 artists and thinkers and writers in the Christian world push it to such a limit that almost they

00:12:50.660 become desensitised to it. And by the 19th century, when Nietzsche is writing, I think that most people

00:12:57.820 probably going into a church and looking at a cross are not thinking of it as an absolutely hideous

00:13:03.660 instrument of torture. And they're probably not visualising the appalling sufferings that a man

00:13:10.220 nailed to it would have undergone. And it's a kind of paradox, a very Nietzschean paradox,

00:13:17.600 that probably the most devastating, you know, to Christian faith, the most devastating atheist who's 1.00

00:13:24.180 ever written in the Christian tradition, Friedrich Nietzsche, should have felt the power of the cross 0.77

00:13:30.480 so profoundly. And he feels it as something disgusting. He feels it perhaps in the sense

00:13:36.740 that a Greek or Roman would. The idea that someone who had suffered such a servile fate could in any way

00:13:43.160 be worthy of approbation, let alone worship, appalls Nietzsche, because he sees it as an offence

00:13:50.500 against the values of strength and power and glory and beauty that he identifies in Greek and Roman

00:13:58.220 culture. And which, frankly, he thinks has been corrupted by Christianity, this faith of slaves, 0.99

00:14:04.780 as he describes it. And one of the reasons he describes it as the faith of slaves is because

00:14:08.800 crucifixion is the fate that is visited on slaves. And I, when I was writing Dominion, I was about two

00:14:17.600 chapters through, and then I got a commission to make this film that you mentioned in your introduction

00:14:22.600 about the Islamic State. And I ended up going to this town called Sinjar, which had been the home 1.00

00:14:30.140 of people called the Yazidis. I'm sure you'll know. I'm sure lots of people listening will know

00:14:33.880 people who were accused by the Islamic State, not just of being infidels, but of being devil worshippers,

00:14:40.800 and had been treated peculiarly horribly. And the women had been rounded up, and those who were thought

00:14:46.280 too ugly to take off as sex slaves had been killed, and those who hadn't had been taken off and sold 0.98

00:14:52.060 into sexual slavery. But the men, some of them had been crucified. And to be in a town that had been 0.99

00:14:59.560 liberated just a few weeks before by the Kurds, and the Islamic State were a couple of miles away from

00:15:04.560 where we were across kind of blank, open fields. To be in a town where people had suffered crucifixion

00:15:14.040 at the hands of people who viewed crucifixion as the Romans had viewed it, as a fate that it was not

00:15:20.820 just the right of the powerful to visit on the defeated, but a moral duty, I found kind of

00:15:28.020 existentially horrible. And I suppose it kind of opened my mind to the sense in which I think the idea

00:15:38.120 that someone who is tortured to death has a moral value over the person who tortures him to death,

00:15:44.980 underpins my moral system, and I think the moral system of the vast number of people in the West.

00:15:52.220 And I came back and I rewrote the introduction to the book to focus on the crucifixion as being the kind of

00:15:59.740 maddest, strangest, weirdest symbol that anyone in antiquity came up with. And it may not be a coincidence that

00:16:07.820 it is, of course, the most enduring symbol, probably the best known symbol maybe in world history.

00:16:14.700 Yeah. I mean, one thing you get from reading history, certainly reading Dominion, or your other,

00:16:22.300 I guess Rubicon conveys it too, your discussion of Rome, is just how foreign and, through a modern

00:16:31.140 lens, pathological the ethics of antiquity were, right? I mean, just, I think, is it Thucydides who

00:16:37.560 said that the strong do what they will and the weak suffer what they must? Or some, that's probably close

00:16:44.100 to the translation.

00:16:45.240 A phrase that is being quoted a lot at the moment, it must be said.

00:16:48.440 And yeah, I mean, so you actually make that point in your documentary on the Islamic State,

00:16:54.300 as you're walking through Sinjar, that this was a promulgation of a Roman ethic, essentially. I mean,

00:17:00.920 I think you say something like they murdered these people very much the way, you know, the Roman legions

00:17:06.080 would have, or there's some line like that, direct comparison to Rome, which I found briefly shocking

00:17:11.660 because I realized I rarely view the Greeks and Romans through this lens of moral judgment,

00:17:21.900 the same kind of judgment I, I lavish upon jihadists, right? But yet there, there's something awful

00:17:29.660 about their, their ethics and their, their celebration of strength over weakness.

00:17:35.500 Well, I mean, that is a perspective that I would argue is shaped by 2,000 years of Christian weathering

00:17:42.460 because, I mean, Nietzsche certainly saw the morality of the Greeks and the Romans as, as something admirable,

00:17:50.060 as of course, in due course, did Hitler. But it's, it's, I mean, it's wrong to say that the Romans are,

00:17:56.060 are immoral. They, they weren't at all. They saw themselves as the most moral of peoples.

00:18:01.420 And this is why the gods had given them the rule of the world.

00:18:04.540 And also you read like the Stoic philosophers, right? And it's, you're, you're, you're in the

00:18:08.700 presence of some of the greatest wisdom philosophy has ever produced. And yet to know of, of the,

00:18:16.140 the normalcy of crucifixion occurring in the background is peculiar.

00:18:20.300 I mean, I think I, so as a child, I always found Greece and Rome infinitely more glamorous than,

00:18:29.900 than the, than the, than the Israelites and then the, and then the apostles. So I was always team

00:18:36.540 Pharaoh, team Nebuchadnezzar, team Pontius Pilate. I kind of thrilled to the glamour and the swagger

00:18:43.340 of Tyrannosaurus as an even younger child. And I guess that I was perfectly capable of being

00:18:55.180 thrilled and excited by the thought of the Spartans at Thermopylae or Caesar conquering Gaul. And I would

00:19:03.660 do that in part by also identifying my moral inheritance as something that derived from

00:19:09.980 Greek philosophy. But I guess that, um, one of the, uh, well, actually probably the main thing

00:19:16.300 that led me to write Dominion, a history of Christianity, which I had, had never been on

00:19:22.540 my agenda. I always viewed, I had a kind of almost synesthetic sense of antiquity. And I thought of

00:19:28.540 Greece and Rome as with bright blue Californian skies. And I thought of Christianity as, you know, 0.58

00:19:34.300 the drizzle of an English autumn setting in and blotting out the sun. But I realized as I wrote

00:19:42.700 about Caesar, who was hailed as a great man by his fellow citizens for inflicting hundreds of

00:19:50.300 thousands of casualties on and during the course of the conquest of Gaul, enslaving an equal number

00:19:56.460 and kind of exalting in it and realizing that this really wasn't my moral system at all.

00:20:02.780 Um, and I began, I felt it was kind of like, you know, I suppose the kind of the prickle in the back

00:20:08.540 of the throat that heralds the onset of a cold, the sense that, that something was kind of, that I had,

00:20:15.020 couldn't quite get a handle on was, was waiting to, to take me over. And I began to think, well,

00:20:21.660 is it actually Christianity that changes? Is that, is that what explains the, the, the process of

00:20:27.980 transformation? And I explored it in the third work of history I wrote, which was focused very much

00:20:34.300 on what I think is a kind of great process of revolution in 11th century Latin Christendom.

00:20:40.460 So the Western half of what had been the Roman empire. And it's often called the papal revolution

00:20:45.020 because the revolutionaries are people who take control of the Roman church and it's led by popes.

00:20:53.660 And it, it forces through a kind of very radical process of a recalibration of society that

00:21:02.060 essentially divides the world into rival spheres that in due course in the West is what, what we call 0.68

00:21:08.380 religion and the secular. And this is a, a division that did not exist in antiquity.

00:21:14.700 It didn't exist in any other of the civilizations of Eurasia. And I enjoyed the paradox that,

00:21:23.020 that secularism would not probably have been secularism without the labors of 11th century

00:21:30.220 popes. It seemed to be a very entertaining paradox. So I explored that. And then, and then on the back

00:21:35.900 of that, I then became interested in what was the role of Islam in all of this. And I wrote a book on

00:21:41.580 Islam where I was quite skeptical about, uh, quite a lot about early Islam. I, I, this is in the shadow 1.00

00:21:49.180 of the sword in the shadow of the sword. So it seemed to me that the great question about Islam is

00:21:55.340 where does the Quran come from? And it is amazing. The number of books by very distinguished scholars.

00:22:02.620 So it's not even kind of popular history who will say about the revelations Muhammad received

00:22:09.740 the Quran.

00:22:10.220 The Archangel Gabriel. That's the scholarly opinion of the academy.

00:22:14.460 They don't say that, but they, they might say he received the revelations and they leave it at

00:22:19.660 that. And I thought, well, that's not really an adequate explanation if you're not a Muslim. I mean, 1.00

00:22:25.180 if you're a Muslim, then of course it's perfectly adequate. I mean, you know, that's the foundation

00:22:28.620 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

00:22:32.940 to me that the Quran was, I mean, if the Quran had materialized in, I don't know, 15th century New

00:22:39.980 Zealand, I mean, that would be a miracle. It would be incredible. But the fact that it materializes

00:22:45.340 in a place that is rife with Jewish and Christian and Zoroastrian and Roman and Persian and all kinds

00:22:53.340 of cultural influences, and that this is exactly what it reflects, made me think that, that Islam was

00:23:00.220 a product of this, but one that had gone on a, you know, a radically different direction from,

00:23:05.820 from Christianity. And so, so thinking that and studying it and kind of reifying my thoughts

00:23:11.980 about how, what today we would call Judaism and Christianity and Islam and Zoroastrianism

00:23:17.500 were kind of related, but quite radically different in their presumptions, again, sharpened for me the

00:23:24.380 sense of what was distinctive about Christianity and my own sense of being very, very shaped by it.

00:23:33.740 And so that's how I then came to write Dominion. And Dominion was a process of stress testing that

00:23:38.860 theory, because when I began it, I wasn't entirely sure what conclusions I would, I would end up with.

00:23:44.940 Well, I want to get to Islam, as I said, but let's linger here on the connection that you argue for

00:23:51.340 between Christian ethics and secular ethics that many of us imagine to be, you know, quite denuded of

00:23:59.660 any, you know, propositional claim about the truth or necessity of Christianity. Someone like myself,

00:24:05.820 I moved through the world having various moral intuitions informed by just my own thought and

00:24:11.980 then just my collision with the history of ideas, whether it's Western philosophy or Eastern philosophy

00:24:16.540 or, or religions like Christianity. But that, that amalgam translates in my thinking into something

00:24:23.900 that is, has no necessary connection, certainly to Christianity. So let me just throw a few,

00:24:30.860 or try to create a few wrinkles in that picture. One is that, so when you take Christianity itself,

00:24:37.100 the early Christians, you know, from, from Jesus onward, first of all, they were, they were Jews.

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Making Sense - Sam Harris - April 07, 2025

#406 — The Legacy of Christianity

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