THE CULTURE WARS ARE A ROUT:

For years, Tom Holland preferred the ancients over Christian "virtue." However, Dominion relates that these last few years, he has become increasingly disturbed and anxious when researching Athens and Rome. He is now disturbed by ancient cruelty and anxious after realizing that his kind-hearted, benevolent humanitarianism (his wokeness, in other words) is a Christian sentiment. Why are we sweeter than medieval Londoners? Not because we are heirs of Athens, but because we are even more Christian than they were.

Having fallen in love with stories of the glory of the ancients as a boy, Holland now recoils from the pervasive cruelty of the age. No longer a Nietzschean, Holland still thinks Nietzsche--who became a professor of classics at age 24--got his history right. Nietzsche:

It appears to me that the delicacy, even more the hypocrisy of tame domestic animals (by this, I mean modern man, I mean us) is loath to envisage to what extent cruelty constituted the great festivity and pleasure of mankind in earlier days, and even an ingredient in almost all of its pleasures.

Holland's thesis is that those least likely to feel comfortable acknowledging any debt to Christianity--the woke--are, in fact, Christian revolutionaries. Contrary to the commentariat, Dominion arrestingly claims that Christianity is not conservative, but revolutionary--that Western (or even world) history is best viewed as a series of ruptures wrought by Christian revolutions making us all kinder: "to dream of a world transformed by a reformation, or an enlightenment, or a revolution is nothing exclusively modern. Rather, it is to dream as medieval visionaries dreamed: to dream in the manner of a Christian."

Put differently, history is really a contending with the writings of St. Paul. Paul's letters, argues Holland, are the most powerful letters ever written. Penned about a decade after the death of Jesus--the Gospels were written years later--Holland likens them to depth-charges sounding down the ages, scrambling settled patterns of life. For Paul, the crucified criminal Jesus is, in fact, a metaphysical, personal love structuring the core of reality. Love dissolves the distinction between Jew and Greek, slave and free, man and woman. Henceforth, citizenship in the real kingdom would be a matter of belief, not social standing. Paul announced a Spirit permeating all people, no matter their status, and permeating the world: "You show that you are a letter from Christ, the result of our ministry, written not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone but on tablets of human hearts" (2 Corinthians 3:3).

When set against corruption and injustice, this Spirit, by animating human hearts, has shaken dynasties and, in Holland's telling, still does. As Nietzsche puts it, the carpet-maker Paul defeated the Roman Empire.

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