Tom Holland’s stupendous new book argues that while we might think we live in an irreligious culture, almost everything about the West is actually an inheritance from Christianity. ‘To dream of a world transformed by a reformation, or an enlightenment, or a revolution is nothing exclusively modern’, he writes. ‘Rather, it is to dream as medieval visionaries dreamed: to dream in the manner of a Christian.’
Holland started his history career as a classicist but, he says, the more he understood the pagan world and its ‘extremes of callousness’, the better Christianity looked.
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