Tom Holland: Did Religion Exist in the Ancient World?

to be president a certain classic school lecture this is an annual lecture celebrating the Packman present a success was started by Geneon myself in 1991 spoiled off tasks for all and tremendously exciting year those of us who spend most of our time studying pastors teaching passage talking about the ancient world writing stuff about it because facets for all in the hero to this time will have double the number of schools in the UK and that means tens of thousands of school children had no chance of meeting the getting to grips with the fascination of the ancient world will now be a deformation which after all lice at the root of our civilization for very practical reason the Greece for the first Westerners to write literature and the Romans are the second Westerners to write literature taking off in the bees and that literature contain oh the roots of our educational political cultural intellectual philosophy history you name the Greeks and then the Romans first they are different so it's absolutely we're also enormous ly fortunate in having such wonderful exponents of okay now in our meeting at large as well Bethany Hughes Michael stop Mary beard of course and Tom Holland whom we have here is he his book Rubicon burst upon an astonished world Herceptin oh goodness long time yeah 18 years game a long time to continue producing books of that quality Radio so we're enormously fortunate are having here this evening the program you had in front of you after Thomas talked and we've questioned him intensely friends attacks seminars were criss-crossing questions the whole time to speak do you never get a word in edgeways but the audience asking question said don't be don't be afraid to ask questions and you'll see the rest of the program there we have a little talk from someone who's working with attachments for in the school and then Christopher Clark our treasurer so assembly gathered to celebrate there are students here from and unbelievably I believe working from working and I have to confess that it makes me feel guilty because I have an admission to make which is that the talk I'm going to give tonight such as it would be it's not going to be as fluent and smooth and well heard as I would ideally have wanted it is not going to be as Ciceronian as any speaker on the ancient world aspires to be I have no slides I didn't really even have a plan and the reason for that ladies gentlemen and I know that it's a terrible thing to get your excuses in early but the reason for that is that I am up against the deadline from helping Matt was the famous deadline that term that was failed to be met in antiquity was virgins who was hurrying to finish off the Aeneid and then died quite as serious as that but I do have to get the book that I've been doing for the past three and a half years in by this Christmas or I'm going to have to return all the money Americans be unbelievably serious situation and if I give you some sense of the sweet perhaps you understand why why I'm feeling slightly pressured this new book begins on the banks the horse bolt in 479 BC a person is being crucified on its banks by an Athenian for tiller commanded by the father of Pericles and this serves as a kind of a close this opening service clothes hanger for insanely panoramic sweep over over antiquity at that point looking persians babylon athens and then we move to alexandria and then in the next chapter we look at the emergence of the jewish scriptures again goes way back in time back to Canaan back to the Babylonian exile of the Jews back to possible influence on juice richer of of pursing in ship and person dualism so it's a broad sweep and it continues at a hubristic Lee award pace so we have Pompey stormy Jerusalem we have we have a temple to Augustus being raised in the province of Galatia then the kind of the clothes hanger event in the the next the next chapter is a seaman and amphitheater in the reign of Marcus Aurelius then we have Julia in the outer state visiting a temple in Galatia again and discovering that it's it's been about that pretty much then we have an abandoned temple to Apollo on a mountain in the south of Italy serious vision of bigger firing an arrow which turns in the course kills ability excellent story there and then finally in this section we have a galley pulling into Carthage in the year six three four so 150 years pretty much after all of the American West but of course the Roman Empire is still going strong wolves from Constantinople so you know as I say I massively hubristic sweep however and I tell you that the past week I finished the chapter that I was doing just this afternoon that it's about the writing of imagine and the murder of John Lennon and Paul McCartney's performance at live 8 where lots of too lots of you this will be very very ancient history but some of you may remember all the companies sitting at the piano right into the climax of Live Aid singing let it be and the microphone so you backing what on earth is is all this doing together what on earth does Paul McCartney and John Lennon and James Brown and Bob Dylan all the people mentioned in Chapter I've just finished well they got to do with parents Lisa's dad well this book is my attempt to explore what I think is the most fascinating and the most influential legacy of the classical world into the present and it's one of the very few that can be traced in a kind of continuous line for on antiquity right into the present I suppose that another one might be the study of Virgil it's still the great masterpiece of Western literature and it's been studied continuously every year since since it was finished but my theme is is another one it's a more influential one and I'm looking at kind of nexus of beliefs and practices and suctions and ethics and morals the draw from Greek philosophy that draw from Roman law that draw from personal conceptions of kingship and of good and evil and above all cause it draws from Jewish tradition from Jewish scripture and you would have worked out by now that what I'm talking about is what we today call Christianity and by the second century he was coming to be called Christian excellence so this is a the idea of something called Christianity is something that is very ancient and that continues into the present day however in a sense it is a measure of the impact of Christianity but it has evolved in such a multiplicity of ways but that word Christian is moss as used by Christian philosophers back in the second century AD and our word Christianity there is a sizable belt in signification what we mean by it and what someone back in the second century and II would meant by it is treacherously different and by extinction even more so if I say well what is Christian is moths and today people would say well it's a religion and people would probably say that it is one of a number of religions so Judaism Islam Hinduism Buddhism all these would be categorized as religious and if we were to say furthermore you know well what do you think we mean by a religion I think probably most people would say you know a society kind of ambivalent slightly contradictory to contradictory things but I think bubble they would say that a religion is something that exists in a kind of distinct way from the rest of society you can talk about church and state religion is something that you know it hasn't are very happy but it has GCS you go you study religion you'll have chapters on the religion of the Hindus religion of the Egyptians the religion of the Greeks and it's accepted that this is something that is separate from the rest of society against that there is also a sense that that a religion is about its what an individual believes so who say you know what is your religion are you Christian Jew it was little Hindu whatever it's it's something that defines you personally that defines you individually and there is a kind of lurking sense there of that this is about an individual's relationship with kind of perspective the divine and aspect of the supernatural perhaps and the problem with this is that when we use that an English word religion and we back and project it and we we talk about the religion of the Greeks or we talk about the religion of the Romans or we even talk about the religion of of the Jews in back in antiquity there is a massive massive risk of anachronism and really I want to talk tonight about what that risk is and to demonstrate exactly how it was that after conception of religion today yes emerge from antiquity but over the course of that evolution became something really radically quite different now I've brought with me two books which have been hugely influential on me over the course of my writing about classical antiquity so this is my ultimate great German scholar Greek religion I mean it's it's an absolutely masterly account of what I suppose we might call Greek cultic practices Greek gods Greek philosophy even and they have it Greek religion and then this one religions of Rome I don't know off assignment price and well in the fall she became the world's most famous woman marry be a hugely influential book on me so I was reading these books while I was reading this while I was writing about what while I was writing group on all the new and I was reading this while I was writing about the eh recent Persian fire um but it it kind of pressed on me that this word religion was difficult so and I was kind of inert sufficiently alert to it but I think the whole way through both rukon and perspire never actually used the word religion and what's interesting about this is that despite the title of both of these books I think what you read through them again they they've really talked about religion so the headline is there the title is there but there's clearly a kind of nervousness on the part of scholars of using this this word and part of the reason for that is that um we don't really have an analogous word in either Greek or in Latin so the word that is often cited in Greek for being equivalent to our word religion is rascais when I was translating Herodotus rascais was pretty much on every every page but it was evident that this roasters was not talking about anything that we would recognize today this religion he's he's kind of talking about rituals really he's talking about the cultic practices the sacrifices the priesthood that enable human beings to feel a sense of communion with the gods and as the word it falls over the course of over the course of centuries the word Ferries it can mean in the New Testament presence it appears in the New Testament where it kind of seems to mean worship and in the writings of Philo of Alexandria the great Jewish scholar of the 1st century AD see jiminee seems to use it as making sacrifices so there's something there that is very it's kind of what we might call religious but it's not quite so what what about Latin because the the what our word religion derived from a Latin word ready go and actually when I was when I was doing come so old that I didn't do gene Cincinnati no levels and we did laughing than a level and one of the texts that we did was Lucretia s is great program they were in Ventura which is much celebrated today as a kind of rationalistic poem and there's a famous line in it that that opens the passage of the creatures that might study the score because Tamra Lydia Potter it swaggering meiloorun to such heights of evil is religio capable of inspiring people to behave so you can see why this is a this is a line that has a lot of traction in kind of atheist website so you'll often find it websites devoted to proving that that religion is nonsense that it's all superstition and that one I did it by little in a new told by by our teacher yeah religio means religion so we said essentially the the meaning of this of this line is the religion is a load of rubbish and it's it's it's malevolent rubbish and you should get rid of it and so it's 15 the time lots of gravity ether atheistic giggling at that kind of enjoyed that but there's a problem which is again but just as with a radicchio does not mean religion again religio has this idea of literally means of binding so it's something that the idea is it's something that binds you to a god to a deity to a supernatural agent so it could be a sacrifice it could be adopting priesthood it could be honoring a festival and of course in Rome as if Greece or live comes even more so there were gods everywhere and so there were any number of religio names and there is this kind of pressing sense of anxiety that you you might miss out on a religio and then a god will be pissed off and you'd find your life messed up and on the scale of the city itself so city of rome it's a crucial part of what the elite are about that they have to be respectful of the relay owners they have to do in because by doing that they ensure that the gods favorably on the city and thereby enable rating function now the problem with all these really do names of course is the sheer effort of keeping track of them and it's kind of similar thing that in athens it was there was a guy was was sponsored by by by the demos by the city to work out to go through all the records and to work out all the sacrifices that were necessary to keep the city ticking on an even keel and say this guy went off he went through all the records and tossed it up and he realized that actually if they practiced all the sacrifices that tradition the attention that they should the city would be absolutely bankrupt his findings were kind of buried they just carried on with the sacrifices that that they already had and so there's a similar sense of anxiety in in in Rome as well and this became all the more pressing in the third century AD when Roman prosperity started to crumble the city the city celebrated its thousandth birthday and there were lots of kind of nervous thoughts well you know we've lasted this long but tiny things have really going badly we've got Persians invading in the east we've got got some kind of hideous barbarians crossing the Rhine we've got Emperor's who can't seem to stay on the stay on their throne for more than a week endless civil wars endless assassinations clearly the heavens across clearly where we're messing up our Lyonnaise here and say one of the trends across the third century AD is that emperors start thinking what we really ought to try and rationalize all these really heroes they're clearly far too many if we can have one god that we have to establish a religion with be so much more convenient and so throughout the third century a succession of emperors audition various gods for the role unbelievably thuggish chevre all Erica father claim them for a Britain or a Gallic hoodie so that's Caracalla he was an Antonia so he's kind of truly the hood really horrible emperor he goes to Alexandria and essentially he's establishing therapist got there as the as the sole God and Brittany I'll get across about this he reacts in a perfectly relaxed temperate way by slaughtering I'm glad to say that a few months later while evading Persia he went off for a pee and got assessment okay he got the robbery and other others so Constantine in a century after Caracalla begin 4th century here your missions Apollo missions Heracles the ignition Sol Invictus the Unconquered Sun if all of these might be the one God and then of course he's fighting a civil war by the Milvian bridge crossing over into Rome and the 40 fights about he has vision of cross so they said and he's told that if he fights under this side then Christ will bless him the Empire and constant time bites the sign of the Cross wins the back of Columbia bridge and so he decides that he's going to pin his fortunes to this new God a God who of course had been an object of much suspicion if they three hundred years since the emergence of Christianity's most worst yet now Constantine doesn't really have a strong sense of what he's Lexington's of it but by the end of the rape he has come to understand that the Christian God is winning God unlike any other because all the other gods the emperor is kind of in charge never has the Pontifex Maximus is the high priest he's the guy whose role in the state is structured around the notion that he has the responsibility to mediate between the Roman people and the dimension of the divine but this is not the case with the church the church already exists the church has emerged over three hundred years and has an identity that is quite distinct and indeed in a sense and tagging istic to the Roman state there is strong sense in the Christian Church but the Roman Empire the Empire had crucified Jesus that had persecuted the Saints that had inflicted martyrdoms on it that was enshrined in the book of Revelation as the of Babylon that this Empire in a sense was distinct and inferior to the church the church was something aside from it and this for women Emperor's was was was something unsettling now they they can't live with it because what the church offers a kind of vast welfare state I have a source of authority and power that over the course of a succeeding centuries will enable the Roman Empire to survive a large number of dissertations and shops what what that means is that that the concept of religio starts to mutate mm-hmm so there is now only the one religion because there is only the one God but that notion of religio the notion of there being the sacrifices priesthoods holy days going back to the time of Romulus this goes this fades and what happens instead is that the responsibility for religion the responsibility for maintaining a kind of communion with the divine settles on a very different order of people and those people are people who have consecrated their entire lives to God and they are said they are they are monks they're Hermits they are nuns these are people who consecrate their virginity to God they consecrate what that they eat bury anything they mortify the flesh they suffer intensely for God and this is what it is to do to be to have religion it is translated from the dimension of the public sphere the Roman sphere of the state and become something that is distinct and separate from it now over the course of the Middle Ages so the the process by which in the West in the Latin West Roman power implodes and fades in it was away and what is left of that structure that Constantine would have recognized is the church and the shock troops of that structure continue to be the monks and can you feel in London that hardens the Herman's they to consecrate themselves to God and so this for people in the Middle Ages as the peoples of Europe are converted and then trained in the practice of of the Christian faith these are the religion names these are the people who have religion and these are people whose gaze is fixed on the dimension of the otherworldly of of the Dian of the eternal of the dimension of the divine and against them is counter pointed the dimension of what is called the psyche you know again the psyche ulam isn't what is a Latin word that derives from the pagan Age cycle 'm is the span of a human life or rather of human memory and so every psyche ulam a celebration is held to celebrate the birth of brain for instance and it's generally felt that this could be 20 years 100 years 120 years when it comes to trying to be settled on a hundred year segments in century derives from secular but what you have in the idea of the cycler is that stuff gets forethought so you as a child might speak to your great-grandfather and you might hear his memories and then you will have them but then you will die and those memories will go forever so to inhabit the dimension of the cyclin amiss to inhabit a dimension in which things are swept away like leaves on earth on the street and so you have in this counter pointing off of religio sphere where people's minds are focused on the thermal or the divine times pointed to the psyche you know the dimension where things you know just turn around every year there's harvests we pick planting so it can tear it goes on and on and on and this is the cycle of the cycle and since you're at the Middle Ages you have this idea of there being these two rival domains and in the High Middle Ages the age of of of that of the the Imperial papacy where Pope's they claim to a power over the entire world then over the course of the Middle Ages you get this sense of religio and Psyche ulam as being distinct spears this is something very radical and awful it's not something that had existed in classical antiquity it's not something that the Jews who are really the alien minority in that ambassador they didn't really have understanding of it in the Islamic world there isn't really anything comparable to this division between the spheres religio in cyclin it's very very distinctive to Latin Christon and then in the 16th century with the Reformation it becomes even more distinctive but is what the Reformation does is to put a premium on the individual and his or her relationship with God so rather than relying on a church rather than relying on monasteries but I want none reason the wandering friars or the Hermits for the mediation instead what the Reformation does is to say there is a personal relationship with you as a believer and God and so again the understanding of religio starts to mutate and change a by the 17th century in England you're starting to see these two kind of opposed senses of what religion could mean that I talked about the beginning of the talk so you have first of all this idea that that a religio religiously starts calling now is is a proper way of organizing a nation's understanding of God so in the reign of demography first the simple wars that stick really is our arguments about what God wants because it is assumed that if England does not have the correct religion the correct religion then God will be angry and that's you know there's something that goes back to back back to Roman times in a way but the anxiety is saying that if we if we if if the correct religion is not being practiced then then God could be antecedents in chaste person says for such heights of evil that's ordinary doesn't matter the only firm foundation of all power that cast loose or Dupre's no government can be stable and of course chance thirsts discovers the hard way but if you don't have you know if you don't have a consensus on religion then there are all sorts of things that happen perhaps and even have your head chopped off but at the same time you also have because of among the the hotter Protestants the demands of Protestants the prospects that end up and in winning the Civil War this sense that religion is about your personal relationship with God and so under Cromwell such as the premium that is set on the personal relationship with God the Cromwell and allows a Brewers torrents so rather than kind of leaning on people of persecuting people who don't ought to all follow the same religion he's amazing that's fine you just believe it what that's okay and that ultimately becomes the model that will pass into the modern period and it works because of that medieval division between religious secular or to Agnes Isaac between the dimension of religion and the secular and what then happens is when for instance the British in the 19th century go to say India Hindustan they arrived there and they look around and they say okay so what is the religion here and we Ottomans there isn't one because the religion is a wholly Protestant concept as the British understanding does that stop the British kind of imposing their concept of religion on Hindustan no it doesn't they're speaking English they make Indians learn English and civilians learn this word religion and as a kind of synergy between reformers religious reformers in India and evangelical Protestants who come from England to try and define a mutually acceptable understanding of what religion in Hindustan might be another you know there are various religions it's a huge one but the main one if what what is the religion of of the Hindus the Hindus are the the people of India so British people suck British officials claim officials start to say okay well this must be Hinduism and then the people who supposedly practice this religion start to think of themselves as Hindus as well so here dude goes from being a description of someone who lives in Hindustan to becoming a description of someone who practices the Hindu religion and the same thing happens with another religion invented by the British Buddhism again there was there was no what equivalent to Buddhism in any Indian language as there was no equivalent to the worth of Hinduism but because English becomes the lingua franca in the Raj not just the concept of religion and the secular but of Hinduism Buddhism becomes internalized by the elites in India and so by the time that India becomes independent the Indian leaders of the independence movement have no problem defining the kind of government they want as secular because as in England in the 17th century what the secular does is to provide a space where different religions can operate but it's hard to emphasize the degree to which this is a mutation from what it existed in India before the British arrival and so you see this kind of strange evolution from the Roman Empire channeling through medieval England mathematical challenge through many Europe through the Reformation and then being exported across the world so that now you have see it's not just Indian it sees itself defines a secular Japan does as well neither of these countries a Christian but the nation's second Christian one and so wherever it exists that country to a degree has been Christianized as an Indian scholar who's included said and very shrewdly the Christianization happens in two ways it happens to a conversion which is the way that most people tend to think and it happens through secularization now I think only one I'm aware of imagine a multi-column but it's going to be one short passage which comes from the record of a British surgeon in Gujarat in 1825 because this will now take us back to Greece and Rome and he is watching a widow incinerate herself on the funeral pyre of her husband there's a lot of debate among Hindu reformers and British missionaries back whether this should be legalized in due course the practice will be banned but but this British surgeon watching it is rather impressed by the spectacle of of this this woman this Widow demonstrating her love for her husband by throwing himself into the funeral pyre and he describes herself in this manner he says contrasted with the lukewarmness of the rest the other women who were gathered watching there was kind of loveliness of manner in the victim herself a gracefulness of speech and attitude approaching to my conception of the sublime or the inspiration of a Python s at the delivery of an Oracle of course he's not talking about snake he's comparing her to the petty up to thee to the goddess who channels Apollo at Delphi in ancient Greece and say what he is doing there and this is where it begins is he's back projecting this idea of religion onto the Greeks as they we've gone full circle the notion of of religio which originated in ancient Rome is adapted by the Christians and over the course of time we get classically educated Europeans with variant of the word religion back projecting that concept on to the Greeks and the Romans and the Assyrians and Egyptians and whoever and part of the problem with this is that it's almost impossible to talk about what we mean by religion in reference to the Greeks and Romans without kind of Christianizing and this is really the challenge in writing about and Fastow effectively sense of classical antiquity is the to use of modern european language to do that these languages are so impregnated with Christian assumptions but it's incredibly difficult to use them as tools for describing how the ancients thought to Christianity although they refused mainly FGM and fewer fewer people may find themselves as practicing believing Christians there is a kind of haze that has been left by the centuries in the millennia of of Christian practice in Western Europe that means of the dust is kind of everywhere I mean if you're hostile to Christianity you might say it's a kind of asbestos dust you can't help but read in your positive towards it you might say it's a kind of perfume yeah but it is very very very difficult to get grips both with what is truly revolutionary like West German it's an incredibly transformative process and also with just how alien and strange classical antiquity is and that is why has it's for all it's such a wonderful charity because you can read classical texts in English but so the reasons I hope that I've been talking about this evening those English texts will inevitably be treacherous if you can get back to the original text if you can have a sense of what religio meant that is not clouded by all the subsequent Christian accretions then you will have a chance of understanding what the ancient Rome is about and as it's the case whenever you knew you access a different culture it's mind broadening because you will have a sense of how infinite and variable human civilization can be and that's why learning Latin learning Greek is such an immense privilege and it's the kind of thing that once you've done it you will never regret [Applause] let's discuss the star chop-chop hey somebody defined ancient religion as performance indexed piety which I thought was really rather good because it didn't sound in the slightest bit like Christian religion and you know ritual and all that stuff that seems to be an essence of ancient religion that that was yeah absolutely yes which certainly is not of modern religion in quite that sense yeah it's it's it's very transactional I think I think it's the essence there is this idea you perform a sacrifice and there's lots to come to you and if something happens to you thank you but undoubtedly there are also kind of personal relationships that Greeks and Romans have with with the gods there is a kind of yearning for that so one of the things that both Christianity and rabbinic Judaism immersion - is is in a century of for Christ there are a lot of of Gentiles who finding the Jewish God the most impressive at all because the sizes because he seems trying to be mortally powerful compared to all the other gods I said there's a lot of debate in the Jewish world about whether this is a good or a bad thing good to encourage Gentiles to worship is the Jewish God pre-eminently God of Israel isn't really brought is created the entire world and it's the whole spectrum of opinion on that and there's a sense in which what emerges as Christianity is it's the kind of yetiz the God of the whole world everyone to have a bit of it and what emerges is were bit of computers of this the abuses of God of Israel you've got a man comin at you Jewish and it's in that sense that that I think both will benefit dualism and Christianity are recognisably shaped by the experience belonging to to this world in which there are secrets Greeks Romans Egyptians and a sense that this kind of transactional relationship with the divine is is is a bit reductive really people kind of happy with that but it gets a bit though I'd say one of one of the one of the kind of great popular myths about about the triumph of Christianity after Constantine is that poor words of Christians rush around smashing up all the temples they do occasionally you're getting kind of lives of saints that say that they do this but they're almost certainly not true because the archaeological evidence points pretty definitely to the fact that by the third century most of these cults were starting to go into abeyance but they were dependent on the wealth of powerful noblemen to invest in a little bit to keep them going and that in the nature civil war and collapse that simply wasn't there so the parallel actually with the temples is is severe enough about churches now England but the churches are there they're very ancient but what you do because yes another key difference between Christianity is that the rituals ensure that the golden ritual as though he had five senses whereas the Christian good yes yes so so the the Greek gods are a McCoy is a much lower ship we're just it's just me I've kind of corporeal their that their flesh here you give them you know sacrifices of blood and they are imagine this movie where as where's the Christian goal that's not the case although of course there isn't the sacrifice and yeah I think that I think the Walkman what emerges is Protestantism centuries later this idea you have a personal relationship with God is absolutely there it kiss it within God speaking to Moses God this idea that you could have a personal relationship with this dog and yet this dog is unfathomably great powerful it's created everything I think it's that it's that fusion of of the kind of cosmic and the intimate look marks both explain to me why they are with us still yes with mrs. actually acting in the play and you know he talks to them about a new experience yeah yeah say what about the back what about the personal it's a new personal relationship you have with Dionysus where you surrender to to the backache rituals and there are certainly parallels there and there are parallels also in the cult of Keeble a whose devotees they tourists eat themselves to their object they worship which is something Christians didn't do and it's really telling that the Roman authorities tried to battle them all they tried to fire back into rituals they tried to ban the culprit Keyblade they tried to ban Christianity they periodically through the Jews out and so there is I think this sense among the red meat that a kind of personal relationship like that is dangerous now why this why does Christianity triumph when when when the backi and the backing rights come to Keyblade don't I just think that getting incredibly paid or hacking off your testicles it's kind of less immediately popular perhaps my church that will look after if you get locked up in prison I think it's to be very [Music] or Orthodox Christianity said there is a difference between Christian between Orthodox and Catholic rest of them in the Middle Ages yeah I mean there's quite a considerable one and the principle the papacy matters because it's not about personal ambitions amazing what happens in the 11th century Europe is that in the absence of an emperor with the Heckman status of the emperor in Constantinople revolutionaries and I use that work very advisedly who in Latin Christendom want to basically baptize the whole world they want to cleanse the world they want to purify the whole of society and they do this by seizing control of the bishopric of Rome and turning the bishopric of Rome into what we would now recognize as the papacy ie a bishopric that could claim a kind of moral and spiritual authority over everyone and the mark of that capture of the papacy by these revolutionaries is that they set out to Humble the Emperor so there is an emperor in the West and he economies based in what's now Germany and the marker of his humiliation is that he's made to wait out in a slow and to get blessing from the Pope so the difference is that in Constantinople the options of doing that don't exist because the relationship between church and Emperor is kind of what it's being since constant language variations but in in the West because the thing that the Emperor is much weaker therefore there is scope for pay per foot for for revolutionary to get associated with the papacy to impose an idea that the whole of society that the change and that of course is an idea that that is pregnant with implications of the future because what they call this process of change of revolution they call it Reformation and that's the word that is then used by Calvin so actually what we call third Reformation is just a second referee party and then in the Enlightenment again at the French Revolution and the Russian Revolution and even today so what you know when people are woke woken as' is another reverberation of that desire for everybody it's it if you're woke you want the world to be pure you want you want justice you want equality and you're prepared to do it in a kind of radical way and this is something that is just a turn [Music] well the creatures would agree with me babies but what I would say is that one person superstition is another person's de family and so the the issue of water to Lydia water super city is yeah well I think that some maybe your comments about your not being surrounded there seems to me to be something versus roaming about starting a speech by saying well I haven't prepared this and I don't know what going to come up and then you produce this extraordinary lecture when you talk about all the things you say I'm not going to talk about and actually make us think that it's a completely different way so thank you so much thank you [Applause]

Channel: Classics for All

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Keywords: tom holland, ancient religion

Id: ZeCTC_r4vMI

Length: 55min 49sec (3349 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 31 2018