21 June 2023

56, 534 words

174 pages

N EO -C HRISTIANITY
A paradigm shift for racialists through
a presentation of Tom Holland’s Dominion

César Tor t (editor)

 Cover:

An unforgettable, final scene

in Stanley Kubrick’s Spartacus:
the Appian Way, a Roman road used
as a route for military supplies for
its conquest of southern Italy and
for improvements in communication.

Published as a PDF on June 2023

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 The following books
have been written, edited,
presented or treasured
by the author:

Hellstorm: The Death of Nazi

Germany (by Tom Goodrich)
The Fair Race’s Darkest Hour
Memories and Reflections
of an Aryan woman
(by Savitri Devi)
Daybreak
On Exterminationism
Christianity’s Criminal History
(by Karlheinz Deschner)
On Beth’s Cute Tits
Day of Wrath
Letter to mom Medusa
Hojas susurrantes
¿Me Ayudarás?
El Grial

[email protected]
http://www.westsdarkesthour.com

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4
Contents

Preface 7

The NT was authored by rabbis – David Skrbina 11

Interim report: Dominion – Editor 37

How Christianity became Neo-Christianity – Tom Holland* 39

The Appian Way – Editor 167

Law against Christianity – Friedrich Nietzsche 173

____________

(*) This text is annotated by the Editor.

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6
 Preface
This presentation of Thomas Holland’s book Dominion: How
the Christian Revolution Remade the World can only be contextualised as
another element of a collection of my treasured books (see page 3)
that provide a new worldview that we could summarise, in a
nutshell, as my spiritual odyssey from Jesus to Hitler.
All my life, until Christmas 2018 when I was already sixty, I
believed that Jesus of Nazareth existed. Throughout my early years
I believed not only in his historicity but in his miracles. It was only
in my twenties that I began to frantically read the liberal Christians
who wrote about New Testament criticism. But even non-Christian
scholars assumed that a human Jesus existed.
Dr Richard Carrier, author of On the Historicity of Jesus: Why
We Might Have Reason for Doubt, is one of the leading exponents of
the Christ myth theory or mythicism. He has even responded to
what I used to consider the strongest argument for the existence of
the historical Jesus.1 Carrier’s response struck me like a thunderbolt
and I ceased to believe in Jesus’ historicity.
Five years later, in mid-June 2023 I discovered the biblical
scholar Richard Miller, author of Resurrection and Reception in Early
Christianity. Like me, Miller was raised in a very Christian family. He
has three master’s degrees and a doctorate in New Testament
studies, and his conclusions are similar to Carrier’s. Since reading
the latter’s book, I mentioned on my website The West’s Darkest

1 There are seven authentic epistles of Paul. In one of the

oldest Paul speaks of the ‘brother of the Lord.’ Based on what Paul
says in Galatians 1:19 historicists believe that this is the strongest
argument for the historicity of Jesus. Before reading Carrier I was
unaware that mythicists had pretty compelling answers to this
argument. See e.g., ‘Ehrman and James the Brother of the Lord’
published on Richard Carrier’s website on November 6, 2016.

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Hour that I am impressed by what Carrier (and now Miller) say
about Romulus: the Roman god par excellence. Some 1st-century
writers (presumably Jews) took as their model for the gospels the
legends of the resurrection of Romulus, the post-mortem
appearances of Romulus and his ascension to heaven. When Miller
made this discovery while reading a Loeb Classical Library bilingual
book, he wept and lost his Christian faith as he confesses in a video
that can be seen on YouTube: ‘Bible Scholar Dr Richard C. Miller
Leaves Christianity.’ But what neither Carrier nor Miller wonder is
why some 1st-century Jewish writers created the Gospel myth in the
first place.
The opening article in this anthology, taken from a book by
David Skrbina, offers a plausible answer: they did it to subvert the
gentile world. As I said in Daybreak, right after the Romans
destroyed the Temple of Jerusalem Mark used Rome’s foundation
myth of Romulus to invert values. (In Mark’s gospel, Romulus’
material kingdom favouring the mighty has been transformed into a
spiritual kingdom favouring the humble: an intentional
transvaluation of the Roman Empire’s ceremony.) That’s why, once
in charge, the Christians tried to erase any trace of the original story,
the Romulus festivals, when they destroyed most of the Latin books
from the 4th to the 6th century.
Most of the content of this book quotes Tom Holland’s
Dominion. Unlike David Skrbina, Holland is unaware of the Jewish
Question. However, referring to Hitler and Stalin’s willing
executioners, Holland wrote: ‘The measure of how Christian we as
a society remain is that mass murder precipitated by racism tends to
be seen as vastly more abhorrent than mass murder precipitated by
an ambition to usher in a classless paradise.’
This is fundamental to understanding our times, and
explains why the tens of millions that the communists genocided in
the last century do not raise much concern among Westerners, nor
do they make films or documentaries to awaken the masses, or even
university students, about this Holocaust perpetrated by Bolsheviks.
By detecting this astronomical double standard when judging Hitler,
we begin the historical odyssey: a detective work of two millennia in
a quest to find the mental virus that originated not only the
revolutionary message of the early Church, medieval and modern
out-group altruism, but even the French and the Russian
revolutions and the Woke monster of our times.

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 This book is addressed to whites who want to defend their
lineage but for one reason or another are unable to revalue their
Semitic values for Aryan values. The paradigm shift proposed here
is simple: Christian morality is the primary cause of Aryan
decline; not, as most white nationalists believe, Jewish subversion.
White nationalists will never solve the Jewish problem because,
unlike Himmler, they are still programmed by Judeo-Christian
morality, and at least today’s generation of racialists wants to remain
programmed by such standards.
It is paradoxical, but as long as they believe that the JQ is
the primary cause of their decline they will never settle accounts
with Jewry. Settling accounts involves transvaluing our Christian
values for pre-Christian values because it is impossible to solve the
Jewish problem using a framework of values that is itself utterly
Judaic. Transvaluation means repudiating all of Western history
from Constantine onwards, as well as having the spirit of Hitler as
the new avatar to follow (instead of Jesus).
The emphasis in both my excerpts from David Skrbina’s
book and Tom Holland’s book have been added by me (boldface).
César Tort (Editor)

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10
 The New Testament was authored by rabbis
(excerpts from The Jesus Hoax) 2
by David Skrbina

Chapter 1: setting the stage

There are about 2.1 billion Christians on Earth today,
roughly 1/3 of the planet, making Christianity the #1 religion
globally. The United States is strongly Christian; about 77% of
Americans call themselves Christians.
But some historians and researchers have made a startling
claim: that Jesus, the Son of God, never existed. They say that Jesus
Christ was a pure myth. Is that even possible? Surely not, we reply.
This most-influential founder of the most-influential religion of
Christianity surely had to exist. And he surely had to be the miracle-
working Son of God that is proclaimed in the Bible. How could it
be otherwise? we ask. How could a venerable, two thousand-year-
old religion, with billions of followers throughout history, be based
on someone who never existed? Impossible! Or so we say.
If that were the case, if Jesus never existed, imagine the
consequences: an entire religion, and the active beliefs of billions of
people, all in vain. All of Christianity based on a myth, a fable,
even—as I will argue—a lie. Why, that would be catastrophic…

2 Editor’s note: David Skrbina, The Jesus Hoax (Detroit:

Creative Fire Press, 2019).

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 Note that it’s very important to distinguish between the two
conceptions of Jesus. If someone asks, “Did Jesus exist?” we need
to know if they mean (a) the divine, miracle-working, resurrected
Son of God (sometimes called the biblical Jesus), or (b) the ordinary
man and Jewish preacher who died a mortal death (sometimes
called the historical Jesus). Christianity requires a biblical Jesus, but
the skeptics argue either for simply an historical Jesus—which
would mean the end of Christianity—or worse, no Jesus at all.
I will, however, accept the historical Jesus…

Another Jesus skeptic?

So, why this book? Why do we need yet another Jesus
skeptic?
To answer this question, let me give a brief overview of
some of the prominent skeptics and their views. I will argue that
their ideas, though on the right track, are woefully short of the
truth. They lack the courage or the will to look hard at the evidence,
and to envision a more likely conclusion: that Jesus was a
deliberately constructed myth, by a specific group of people, with a
specific end in mind. None of the Christ mythicists or atheist
writers have, to my knowledge, articulated the view that I defend
here.
But first a quick recap of the background and context for
the idea of a mythological Jesus. The earliest modern critic was
German scholar Hermann Reimarus, who published a multi-part
work, Fragments, in the late 1770s.3 Strikingly, his view is one of the
closest to my own thesis of any skeptic. For Reimarus, Jesus was
the militant leader of a group of Jewish rebels who were fighting
against oppressive Roman rule. Eventually he got himself crucified.
His followers then constructed a miraculous religion-story around
Jesus, in order to carry on his cause. They lied about his miracles,
and they stole his body from the grave so that they could claim a
bodily resurrection. This is quite close to what I will call the
‘Antagonism Thesis’—that a group of Jews constructed a false Jesus
story, based on a real man, in order to undermine Roman rule. But

3Editor’s note: Actually, only after Reimarus’ death, Gotthold

Lessing published parts of Reimarus’ work as Fragments by an
Anonymous Writer in 1774–1778, giving rise to what is known as the
beginning of critical research of the historical Jesus.

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there is much more to the story, far beyond that which Reimarus
himself was able to articulate.
In the 1820s and 30s, Ferdinand Baur published a number of
works that emphasized the conflict between the early Jewish-
Christians—significantly, all the early Christians were Jews—and
the somewhat later Gentile-Christians. This again is a key part of
the story, but we need to know the details; we need to know why the
conflict arose, and what were its ends.
In 1835, David Strauss published the two-volume work Das
Leben Jesu—“The Life of Jesus.” He was the first to argue, correctly,
that none of the gospel writers knew Jesus personally. He
disavowed all claims of miracles, and argued that the Gospel of
John was, in essence, an outright lie with no basis in reality.
German philosopher Bruno Bauer wrote a number of
important books, including Criticism of the Gospel History (1841), The
Jewish Question (1843), Criticism of the Gospels (1851), Criticism of the
Pauline Epistles (1852), and Christ and the Caesars (1877). Bauer held
that there was no historical Jesus and that the entire New
Testament was a literary construction, utterly devoid of historical
content. Shortly thereafter, James Frazer published The Golden
Bough (1890), arguing for a connection between all religion—
Christianity included—and ancient mythological concepts.
It was about at this time that another famous Christian
skeptic emerged: Friedrich Nietzsche. In his books Daybreak (1881),
On the Genealogy of Morals (1887), and The Antichrist (1888) he
provides a potent critique of Christianity and Christian morality.
Nietzsche always accepted the historical Jesus, and even had good
things to say about him.4 But he was devastating in his attack on

4 Editor’s note: In one of his writings not intended for

publication, Nietzsche dared to say things he dared not say in his
books. I reproduce below an explosive fragment for the 19th-century
mentality from the spring of 1888, which was not published in
German until 1970:
Jesus is the counterpart of a genius: he is an idiot. You feel his
inability to understand reality: he moves in circles around five or
six terms, which he formerly heard and gradually understood, i.e.,
has understood them wrongly—he has them in his experience,
his world, his truth—the rest is alien to him. He speaks words
used by anyone—but he does not understand them like everyone;
he only sees his five, six floating concepts. That the real mannish

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Paul and the later writers of the New Testament. He viewed
Christian morality as a lowly, life-denying form of slave morality,
attributed not to Jesus but to the actions of Paul and the other
Jewish followers. Along with Reimarus, Nietzsche provides the
most inspiration for my own analysis.
Into the 20th century, we find such books as The Christ
Myth (1909) and The Denial of the Historicity of Jesus (1926), both by
Arthur Drews, and The Enigma of Jesus (1923) by Paul-Louis
Chouchoud. All these continued to attack the literal truth claimed
of the Bible.
More recently, we have critics such as the historian George
Wells and his book Did Jesus Exist? (1975). Here he assembles an
impressive amount of evidence against an historical Jesus. Bart
Ehrman has called Wells “the best-known mythicist of modern
times,” though in later years Wells softened his stance somewhat;
he accepted that there may have been an historical Jesus, although
we know almost nothing about him. Wells died in 2017 at the age
of 90. Similar arguments were offered by philosopher Michael
Martin in his 1991 book, The Case against Christianity. Though a wide-
ranging critique, he dedicated one chapter to the idea that Jesus
never existed. Martin died in 2015.
Among living critics, we have such men as Thomas
Thompson, who wrote The Messiah Myth (2005); he is agnostic about

instincts—not just the sex, but also those of struggle, pride,

heroism—never wake up at him; that he remained as backward
and childish as the age of puberty, that belongs to a certain type
of epileptic neuroses.
Jesus is unheroic in his deepest instincts: he never fights.
He who looks something like a hero in him, as Renan, has
vulgarized the type into the unrecognizable.
Take heed of his inability to comprehend something
spiritual: the word for spirit is in his mouth misunderstanding!
Not the faintest whiff of science, taste, mental discipline, logic
has fanned this idiotic saint: as little as it has touched his life. —
Nature? Laws of Nature?— No one has revealed to him that
Nature exists. He knows only moral effects: a sign of the lowest
and most absurd culture. This must be noted: Jesus is an idiot
surrounded by a very clever people—only that his disciples were
not that smart. Paul was absolutely not an idiot! From it depends
on the history of Christianity.

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an historical Jesus, but argues against historical truth in the Bible.
By contrast, Earl Doherty (The Jesus Puzzle, 1999), Tom Harpur (The
Pagan Christ, 2004), and Thomas Brodie (Beyond the Quest for the
Historical Jesus, 2012) all deny that any such Jesus of Nazareth ever
existed. Richard Carrier, in his book On the Historicity of Jesus (2014),
finds it highly unlikely that any historical Jesus lived. Perhaps the
most vociferous and prolific Jesus skeptic today is Robert Price, a
man with two doctorates in theology and a deep knowledge of the
Bible. Price’s central points can be summarized as follows:
1) The miracle stories have no independent verification
from unbiased contemporaries.
2) The characteristics of Jesus are all drawn from much
older mythologies and other pagan sources.
3) The earliest documents, the letters of Paul, point to an
esoteric, abstract, ethereal Jesus—a “mythic hero archetype”—not
an actual man who died on a cross.
4) The later documents, the Gospels, turned the Jesus-
concept into an actual man, a literal Son of God, who died and was
risen…
With the exception of Nietzsche, all of the above individuals
exhibit a glaring weakness: they are loathe to criticize anyone. No
one comes in for condemnation, no one is guilty, no one is to blame
for anything. For the earliest writers, I think this is due primarily to
an insecurity about their ideas and a general lack of clarity about
what likely occurred. For the more recent individuals, it’s probably
attributable to an in-bred political correctness, to a weakness of
moral backbone, or to sheer self-interest. In recent years, academics
in particular are highly reticent to affix blame on individuals, even
those long-dead. This is somehow seen as a violation of academic
neutrality or professional integrity. But when the facts line up
against someone or some group, then we must be honest with
ourselves. There are truly guilty parties all throughout history, and
when we come upon them, they must be called out…
For now I simply note that none of our brave critics, our
Jesus mythicists, seem willing to pinpoint anyone: not Paul, not his
Jewish colleagues, not the early Christian fathers—no one. A
colossal story has been laid out about the Son of God come to
Earth, performing miracles, and being risen from the dead, and
yet—no one lied? Really? Can we believe that? Was it all just a big
misunderstanding? Honest errors? No thinking person could accept
this. Someone, somewhere in the past, constructed a gigantic lie

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and then passed it around the ancient world as a cosmic truth. The
guilty parties need to be exposed. Only then can we truly
understand this ancient religion, and begin to move forward.

Chapter 2: just the facts

We are fairly confident that a people called “Israel” existed,
thanks to the discovery of the Merneptah Stele—an engraved stone
created around 1200 BC. It is the earliest known reference. The
stele includes this line: “Israel is laid waste and his seed is not.” This
sentence has some interesting implications that I will discuss later
on.
The Dead Sea Scrolls, which date to the first century BC,
contain fragments from every book of the Hebrew Old Testament
(OT), and thus are our earliest proof that the complete document
existed by that time. Whether it appeared any earlier is a matter of
speculation. If we are to accept the tradition, then, the OT was
written over a period of some 1200 years…
An overall picture thus comes into view: There was a Jewish
people, called “Israel,” in the region of Palestine from at least the
1200s BC who engaged in a number of conflicts with the
surrounding peoples, including the Egyptians. They recorded their
own history in the books of the OT, but with substantial amounts
of embellishment and speculation, such that many claims are
unsubstantiated by modern research. And from the texts
themselves, we know that this people viewed themselves as
specifically chosen or blessed by their god, Yahweh or Jehovah, and
that they saw all others as pagan non-believers, to be treated with
contempt.

Enter the Roman Empire

The Roman procurator Pontius Pilate, who governed
Palestine from 26 to 36 AD, was known for his aggressive
treatment of the Jews. But things grew even worse for them after
his removal from power and the ascension of Emperor Caligula in
Rome. Hayim Ben-Sasson writes, “The reign of Caligula (37-41
AD) witnessed the first open break between the Jews and the
Empire… Relations deteriorated seriously during this time.”
Years later, Emperor Claudius issued his third edict, Letter to
the Alexandrians, in which he accused those Jews of “fomenting a

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general plague which infests the whole world.” This is a striking
passage; it suggests that Jews all over the Middle East had
succeeded in stirring up dangerous agitation toward the empire. It
also marks the first occurrence in history of a “biological” epithet
used against them. By the year 49, Claudius had to undertake yet
another expulsion of Jews from Rome.
All this set the stage for the first major Jewish revolt, in the
year 66. Also called the First Jewish-Roman War (there were three),
this event was a major turning point in history. It eventually drew in
some 75,000 Roman troops, who battled against perhaps 50,000
Jewish militants and thousands of other partisans. The war lasted
for four years, ending in Roman victory and the destruction of the
Jewish Temple in Jerusalem in the year 70. It remains in ruins to
this day; only the western wall (“Wailing Wall”) still exists.
There would be two more Jewish wars: in 115-117 (the
Kitos War), and in 132-135 (the Bar Kokhba Revolt). Thousands
died in each, but both ended in Roman victory.

“We are among Jews”

Returning specifically to Christianity, I must note a central
fact of the entire religion: The Bible is an entirely Jewish document.
Front to back, cover to cover, A to Z, Old Testament and New—the
Bible is an entirely Jewish document. The morality, the theology,
the social attitudes, the worldview… all thoroughly Jewish. The Old
Testament obviously so; it was written by Jews, about Jews, and for
Jews. The same holds with the New Testament, although with a
slight twist: it was written by Jews, about Jews, but for non-Jews.
This twist is crucial to the whole Jesus story.
So let’s look specifically at the New Testament. Regarding
this most important document, Nietzsche put it well, I think: “The
first thing to be remembered, if we do not wish to lose the scent
here, is that we are among Jews.” That is, all the characters are Jews,
and all the writers—as far as we can determine—were Jews.

Paul and the Gospels

Born as Saul in Tarsus (modern-day Turkey) around the
year 6 AD, Paul was a Pharisee, an elite, orthodox Jew, “a Hebrew
born of Hebrews” (Phil 3:5). He also may have been a Zealot,
advocating violent resistance to Rome. Speaking in Acts (22:3), Paul
says “I am a Jew, born in Tarsus of Cilicia.” He continues: “I was a
zealot for God…” (CJB, DLNT) or “I was zealous for God…”—

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the translations vary. Elsewhere he says, “I was more of a zealot for
the traditions handed down by my forefathers than most Jews my
age…” (Gal 1:14). There is a subtle difference between him saying
“I was a zealot…” and “I was a Zealot…”; the text is not clear, and
interpretations differ. But it seems clear that he was an ardent
Jewish nationalist opposed to Roman rule, as was the case with
most elite Jews of the time. He changed his name from the Jewish
‘Saul’ to the Gentile ‘Paul’ (Acts 13:9) and began his work…
If Paul was dead by the year 70, then he just missed the
destruction of the Temple that dealt a shattering blow to the Jewish
community. But something else happened around that time,
something equally significant: the appearance of the first Gospel,
Mark. Why didn’t Paul cite the Gospels? The conclusion is
obvious: They did not yet exist. And indeed, this is what modern
scholarship confirms…
The other major problem with the Gospels is authorship.
Formally they are anonymous. Mark is “the Gospel according to
Mark.” It’s written in third-person grammar, like a textbook, rather
than as the personal account of a specific man. The same is true of
Matthew. Luke is different; it’s a first-person essay directed to a
generic person, “Theophilus,” which simply means “beloved of
God.” The fourth Gospel, John, returns to the third-person style of
Mark and Matthew.
In any case, it’s almost certain that all the Gospel writers,
whoever they were, were Jews. All four contain numerous
references to the OT, something that would only be expected of
elite and educated Jews. Matthew has the most references—
something like 43 direct citations. Mark and Luke have about 20
each, John around 15. But if we include indirect references, parallel
wording, and other allusions, the numbers double or triple.
Matthew is clearly and heavily Jewish, the “most Jewish” of
the Gospels. No scholars dispute this. Mark has been challenged by
some writers, calling him, if not a Gentile, then “a heavily
Hellenized” Jew—but still a Jew nonetheless. The confusion seems
to arise because he was writing to and for Gentiles; this is an
important fact, as I will explain. But it doesn’t change the Jewish
authorship.
Luke, though, is claimed by some to be a Gentile work. But
this doesn’t hold up to critical analysis. First, Paul himself claims
that the word of God was given to the Jews (Rom 3:2) and
therefore the Gospel, as the word of God, must have been written

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by a Jew. Second, the claim that ‘Luke’ is a Gentile name is
irrelevant; other Jews, notably Paul, changed their names upon
conversion to the cause. Third, Luke is never cited as a Gentile, and
his alleged companion, Paul, is never condemned for fraternizing
with such a Gentile. Luke furthermore had detailed knowledge of
Jewish religious customs, as we see in (1:8-20); Gentiles would not
know this. Finally, he claims intimate knowledge of the Virgin
Mary, including what is “in her heart” (2:19)—something that a
non-Jew would be unlikely to know.
But what about the final Gospel, John? This appears to be
the most anti- Jewish—some would say, anti-Semitic—of the four.
This could not possibly have been written by a Jew, true? Not quite.
As James Dunn says, “John, in his own perspective at least, is still
fighting a factional battle within Judaism rather than launching his
arrows from without, still a Jew who believed that Jesus was the
Messiah, Son of God, rather than an anti-semite”…
Even if the Gospels underwent later modification by
Gentiles, as Price and others suggest, this does not change their
essentially Jewish nature.
The remainder of the NT also seems very likely to have had
Jewish authors. The lengthy Hebrews—which is claimed by some
to have been written by Paul—is addressed to Jews and contains at
least 36 direct references to the OT. James is addressed to “the
twelve tribes in the Dispersion,” and so is 1 Peter. It’s clear that
Gentiles would not be lecturing to Jews about God. The other short
letters are ambiguous but contain nothing to indicate Gentile
authorship.
At some point, of course, Gentiles did join the church and
start writing about it. The earliest Church Fathers were probably
Gentiles, including Clement of Rome (died ca. 100) and Ignatius of
Antioch (d. 110). The same holds for the second generation of
Fathers, which would include Quadratus (d. 129), Aristides of
Athens (d. 135), Polycarp (d. 155), and Papias (d. 155). Certainly by
the time of figures like Marcion, Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, Tertullian,
and Origen—in other words, mid-second century to mid-third
century—we are dealing strictly with Gentiles…
To summarize this section: Paul now appears as a religious
fanatic and ardent Jewish nationalist, willing to resort to violence
and even kill non-Jews in order to drive out the Romans. (Later I
will also affix to him the label master liar.) Paul knew nothing of the
four Gospels, because they did not exist in his lifetime. The Gospel

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writers themselves were all Jews, as likely were the anonymous
authors of the remainder of the NT. The Gospels as documents
were likely written between 70 (Mark) and the mid-90s (John). With
this factual background in place, we can now examine precisely why
the traditional Jesus story is not true. Then we will be one step
closer to my central argument: namely, that since the biblical Jesus
story is false, it was evidently constructed by Paul and his fellow
Jews in order to sway the gullible Gentile masses to their side and
away from Rome.

Chapter 3: why the Jesus story is false

The point bears repeating. During Jesus’ entire lifetime,
from, say 3 BC to 30 AD, not one person—not a Christian, not a
Jew, not a Roman, not a Greek—wrote anything about the miracles,
what Jesus said, or what his followers did. No one wrote anything. It’s
as if nothing extraordinary happened at all… The Romans were
excellent record-keepers; surely any such astonishing letters would
have survived. And yet we have not one.
At the same time there lived a famous Jewish philosopher,
Philo. He was born around 20 BC, and thus was an adult at the time
of the Bethlehem star. He lived well past the crucifixion, dying
about the year 50 AD. He would have been the ideal man to record
everything about a Jewish miracleworker and savior. He wrote
about 40 individual essays, which now fill seven volumes. Yet he
says not one word about Jesus or the Christian movement.
It gets worse. For the next 20 years after the crucifixion, we
still have no evidence. From the years 30 to 50 AD, not one thing has
survived that documents Jesus or his miracles: not a letter, not a
book, not an engraving, nothing. Nothing by Jews, nothing by
Christians, nothing by Romans—nothing.
And yet, it’s worse still. We know that, from the year 50, we
have a few letters by Paul. These letters are finished when Paul dies
around the year 70. Now, of course, his letters cannot count as
evidence, because it is exactly his accounts of Jesus that we are
trying to validate. Apart from Paul’s letters, from the years 50 to
70, we still have no evidence. Nothing by other Christians, nothing by
Jews, nothing by Romans—nothing.
And still it gets worse. The Gospels appeared between 70
and the mid-90s. But they, too, cannot count as evidence because it

20
is precisely these documents that need confirmation. Apart from
the four Gospels, from 70 to the mid-90s, we still have no evidence.
In sum: for the entire period of the early Christian era—that
is, from say 3 BC to the mid-90s AD—we have no corroborating
evidence from anyone who was not party to the new religion. Not a
shred of anything exists: documents, letters, stone carvings—
nothing at all. It’s hard to overstate the importance of this
problem… Men such as Petronius, Seneca, Martial, and Quintillian
all lived in the immediate aftermath of the crucifixion and would
have been ideally situated to write about Jesus’ extraordinary life. So
too with Philo, the Jewish philosopher, as I noted above. And yet
not one of these men wrote a single word about him.

The Roman perspective

Josephus is important because he is the first non-Christian
to confirm that a Christian movement existed, at least by the late
first century AD. But what about the Romans?
Tacitus was born in the year 58 to an aristocratic family.
Between 98 and 105 AD he wrote four books, including the highly
important work Histories. As it happens, not one of them so much
as mentions Jesus or the Christians. But his final work, Annals,
which dates circa 115 AD, does include two sentences on them. In
section 44 of Book 15 we read the following:
…a class hated for their abominations, called
Christians by the populace… a most mischievous superstition,
thus checked for the moment, again broke out not only in
Judaea, the first source of the evil, but even in Rome, where all
things hideous and shameful from every part of the world find
their centre and become popular.
The passage is likely authentic but yet odd in that we have
no other reference to Christians in Rome at the time of Nero. But
this is not relevant here. What matters is the stunning fact that it
took until the year 115—80 years after the crucifixion, nearly 120
years after the miracle birth—for the first Roman to document the
Christians. And even then, he grants them all of two sentences.

21
 A second Roman reference—and the third non-
Christian5—comes from Pliny. Like Tacitus, Pliny was an educated
and highly literate aristocrat. By the year 110, at around age 50, he
had assumed the position of imperial governor of a province in the
north of present-day Turkey. In a letter to Emperor Trajan, from
about the same time as Tacitus’ Annals, he writes an extended
critique of the Christian movement. Over the course of about five
paragraphs, Pliny explains his need to repress the Christians,
including executing the non-citizens and shipping citizens to Rome
for punishment. Christianity is described as a “depraved, excessive
superstition,” and Pliny is worried that the “contagion of this
superstition” is spreading. But still, he thinks it “possible to check
and cure it.”
Pliny’s suggestions aside, what we find here is a fascinating
account of a growing but troublesome new religion. The Romans
were generally tolerant of other religions, and thus we must
conclude that there was something uniquely problematic about this
group. It may perhaps have been their Jewish origins, or the fact
that they embodied particularly repellent values. We lack the details
here to determine the cause of the enmity. But in any case, it seems
clear that the early Christians were not simple apostles of love.
Something else was going on with this group that the Romans
found truly galling and, indeed, a kind of threat to the social or
moral order.
And yet, something happened. We know for certain that by
the mid-90s or early 100s latest, Christians were becoming noticed
and causing trouble for the empire. We are fairly sure that Paul lived
and wrote between the mid- 30s and late-60s, and that the Gospels
first appeared between 70 and 95.

Chapter 4: one against all

If the Jews are chosen by God, then everyone else is, of
necessity, not chosen. If Jews are first class humans in the eyes of
God, everyone else is second-class at best. And indeed, Jews do
view themselves as distinct, special, and superior to others. As
Exodus states, “We are distinct from all other people that are upon

5 Editor’s note: Unlike what other scholars, like Richard

Carrier, maintain, Skrbina was talking about one of the paragraphs in
Josephus’ book as legit; not as an interpolation.

22
the face of the earth” (33:16). Similarly, the Hebrew tribe is “a
people dwelling alone, and not reckoning itself among the nations”
(Numbers 23:9). Moses adds that “you shall rule over many
nations” (15:6)… you shall eat the wealth of the nations” (61:5-6).
Clearly, when other people began to encounter these ideas and the
attitudes that derived from them, one would expect a backlash. And
there was. Hence we find a consistent thread of opinions from non-
Jewish observers, for centuries, who are repelled by such
arrogance…
The earliest direct references come from Aristotle’s star
pupil Theophrastus. He had a concern about one of their customs:
“the Syrians, of whom the Jews (Ioudaioi) constitute a part, also now
sacrifice live victims… They were the first to institute sacrifices
both of other living beings and of themselves”. The Greeks, he
added, would have “recoiled from the entire business.” The
victims—animal and human—were not eaten, but burnt as “whole
offerings” to their God, and were “quickly destroyed.” The
philosopher was clearly repelled by this Jewish tradition.
Egyptian high priest Manetho (ca. 250 BC) tells of a group
of “lepers and other polluted persons,” 80,000 in number, who
were exiled from Egypt and found residence in Judea… When in
power they treated the natives “impiously and savagely,” “setting
towns and villages on fire, pillaging the temples and mutilating
images of the gods without restraint,” and roasting the animals held
sacred by the locals. This is a very different version than we read in
the Jewish Bible…
The decline of the Seleucids coincided with Roman ascent.
Rome was still technically a republic in the second century BC, but
its power and influence were rapidly growing. Jews were attracted to
the seat of power, and travelled to Rome in significant numbers. As
before, they grew to be hated. By 139 BC, the Roman praetor
Hispalus found it necessary to expel them from the city: “The same
Hispalus banished the Jews from Rome, who were attempting to
hand over their own rites to the Romans, and he cast down their
private altars from public places”. In even this short passage, one
senses a Roman Jewry who were disproportionately prominent,
obtrusive, even ‘pushy.’
Perhaps in part because of this incident, and in light of the
Maccabean revolt some 30 years earlier, the Seleucid king
Antiochus VII Sidetes was advised in 134 BC to exterminate the

23
Jews… Apollonius Molon wrote the first book to explicitly
confront the Hebrew tribe, Against the Jews.
The rhetoric is clearly heating up. In 63 BC, as we know,
Roman general Pompey took Palestine. In the year 59 BC Cicero
gave a speech, now titled Pro Flacco. The Jewish religion is “at
variance with the glory of our empire, the dignity of our name, the
customs of our ancestors.” That the gods stand opposed to this
tribe “is shown by the fact that it has been conquered, let out for
taxes, made a slave.”
Ten years later Diodorus Siculus wrote his Historical Library.
Among other things, it again recounts the Exodus: “The refugees
had occupied the territory round about Jerusalem, and having
organized the nation of Jews had made their hatred of mankind into
a tradition” (34, 1). Here, though, it is Antiochus Epiphanes, not his
successor Sidetes, that was urged “to wipe out completely the race
of Jews, since they alone of all nations avoided dealings with any
other people and looked upon all men as their enemies”.
The great lyric poet Horace wrote his Satires in 35 BC,
exploring Epicurean philosophy and the meaning of happiness. At
one point, though, he makes a passing comment on the apparently
notorious proselytizing ability of the Roman Jews—in particular
their tenaciousness in winning over others. Horace is in the midst
of attempting to persuade the reader of his point of view: “and if
you do not wish to yield, then a great band of poets will come to
my aid, and, just like the Jews, we will compel you to concede to
our crowd” (I.4.143). Their power must have been legendary, or he
would not have made such an allusion.
The last commentator of the pre-Christian era was
Lysimachus. Writing circa 20 BC, he offers another variation on the
Exodus story. The exiled ones, led by Moses, were instructed to
“show goodwill to no man,” to offer “the worst advice” to others,
and to overthrow any temples or sanctuaries they might come
upon. Arriving in Judea, “they maltreated the population, and
plundered and set fire to the local temples.” They then built a town
called Hierosolyma (Jerusalem), and referred to themselves as
Hierosolymites.
The charge of misanthropy, or hatred of mankind, is
significant and merits further discussion, especially in light of the
Christian story.

24
Romans of the Christian Era
Emperor Tiberius expelled them in the year 19 AD. The
expulsion did not succeed. Eleven years later, as we recall from
chapter two, Sejanus found reason to oppose them again.
Anti-Jewish actions continued. In 49, Claudius once again
had to expel them. In a fascinating line from Suetonius circa the
year 120, we find mention of one ‘Chrestus’ (Latin: Chresto) as the
leader of the rabble; this would be perhaps the fourth non-Jewish
references to Jesus. “Since the Jews constantly made disturbances at
the instigation of Chrestus, [Claudius] expelled them from Rome”.
This is an important observation that, even at that late date, the
Romans still identified Christianity with the Jews.
Despite all this, the beleaguered tribe still earned no
sympathy. The great philosopher Seneca commented on them in his
work On Superstition, circa 60. He was appalled not only by their
superstitious religious beliefs, but more pragmatically with their
astonishing influence in Rome and around the known world,
despite repeated pogroms and banishments. Seneca adds: “The
customs of this accursed race (sceleratissima gens) have gained such
influence that they are now received throughout all the world. The
vanquished have given laws to their victors.” Seneca is clearly
indignant at their reach. Then came the historic Jewish revolt in
Judea, during the years 66 to 70. The Romans were surely gratified;
to their mind, the Jews received their just deserts.
In besieging Jerusalem, and consequently the mighty Jewish
temple, Titus had the Jews trapped. There was thought of sparing
the temple, but Titus opposed this option. For him, “the
destruction of this temple was a prime necessity in order to wipe
out more completely the religion of the Jews and the Christians.”
These two religions, “although hostile to each other, nevertheless
sprang from the same sources; the Christians had grown out of the
Jews: if the root were destroyed, the stock would easily perish”. The
passage closes by noting that 600,000 Jews were killed in the war.
The third and final Jewish uprising occurred just a few years
later, in 132. The reasons for this were many, but two stand out: the
construction of a Roman city on the ruins of Jerusalem, and
Emperor Hadrian’s banning of circumcision: “At this time the Jews
began war, because they were forbidden to practice genital
mutilation (mutilare genitalia)”. Dio describes the conflict in detail.
“Jews everywhere were showing signs of hostility to the Romans,

25
partly by secret and partly overt acts”. They were able to bribe
others to join in the uprising: “many outside nations, too, were
joining them through eagerness for gain, and the whole earth, one
might almost say, was being stirred up over the matter.” For those
today who argue that Jews were perennially the cause of wars, this
would provide some early evidence. Hadrian sent one of his best
generals, Severus, to put down the insurgency. Through a slow war
of attrition, “he was able to crush, exhaust, and exterminate them.
Very few of them in fact survived.”
Finally we have Celsus, a Greek philosopher who composed
a text, The True Word, sometime around 178. The piece is striking as
an extended and scathing critique of the increasingly prominent
Christian sect.

Conclusions
So what can we conclude from this brief overview of some
600 years of the ancient world? To say that the Jews were disliked is
an understatement. The critiques come from all around the
Mediterranean region, and from a wide variety of cultural
perspectives. And they are uniformly negative. I note here that it’s
not a case of ‘cherry-picking’ the worst comments and ignoring the
good ones. The remarks are all negative; there simply are no
positive opinions on the Jews or early Christians. A reasonable
conclusion is that there is something about the Jewish culture that
inspires disgust and hatred.
In any case, it’s clear that the Jews had few if any friends in
the ancient world. Their religion instructed them to despise others
(Gentiles), and others in turn despised them. But the originating
source was the Jews themselves: their religion, their worldview, their
values. They were willing to use and exploit non-Jews for their own
ends. They were willing to kill, and to die.
This situation feeds directly into the circumstances of the
Roman occupation and Paul’s reaction. The preceding analysis
suggests that Paul was interested in nothing other than saving
“Israel,” the Jewish people. We have seen a few textual clues
indicating that he was willing even to commit murder in order to
further his ends. Surely he hated the Romans with a vengeance, and
yet he also could see the futility of confronting them directly.

26
Chapter 5: Reconstructing the truth
To recap, I am reconstructing the likely sequence of events,
based on a total picture and complete analysis of the situation.
Just as Paul’s life was ending, war broke out and the great
Temple was destroyed. We can only imagine the distress and
outrage of the Jewish community. Their hatred of Rome must have
reached atmospheric heights. If the Jews had any illusions about
peaceful coexistence, those were crushed. Military responses were
no longer an option. Perhaps Paul’s ‘psychological’ ploy, the Jesus
hoax, would work after all. But it would have to be taken to the next
level.
Thus it was that Paul’s surviving followers—perhaps Mark,
Luke, John, and Matthew—decided to pick up the game. This band
of “little ultra-Jews”6 needed a more detailed story of Jesus’ life;
Paul’s vague allusions to a real man would no longer suffice.
Someone—“Mark”—thus decided to quote Jesus extensively and
directly. Unlike Paul’s letters, this “gospel” (Paul’s word) would be
intended for mass consumption. It had to be impressive—lots of
miracles from their miracle-man. It would end up with 19 Jesus
miracles wedged into the smallest of the four Gospels. And there
were several other firsts. Here we read, for the first time ever, about
the 12 apostles, Jesus as a carpenter, and the concept of hell. Here
too Jesus makes a clever “prophecy” that the Jewish temple would
be ruined (13:1-2)—an easy call to make, given that the temple was
just actually destroyed! It seems that Mark’s anger against his fellow
Jews, however, got the better of him; for centuries afterward,
Christians would blame the Jews for killing Christ, not realizing that
the whole tale was a Jewish construction in the first place. Perhaps
there’s a kind of justice in that irony after all.
The Gospel of Mark evidently sufficed for some 15 years. It
must have been effective at drawing in Gentiles and building a
functioning church. But then perhaps things stalled a bit. Maybe the
little Jewish band got impatient. Maybe they splintered over tactical
issues. Whatever the reason, some time around the year 85, two of
the group—“Luke” and “Matthew”—decided that they needed to

6 Nietzsche, The Antichrist (sec 44). In German kleine Superlativ

Juden.

27
write an even more detailed account of Jesus’ life. But evidently the
two couldn’t agree on a single plan, so they worked apart, drawing
from Mark’s story while weaving in other new ideas they had jointly
invented. Each man went off on his own, drafting his own new
gospel.
The new documents had much more detail than Mark; in
fact, both were nearly twice as long as their predecessor. They had
to keep the same basic story line, of course, but each man added his
own embellishments. What was new? The virgin birth in
Bethlehem, for one, and the whole manger scene. These now
appeared, for the first time ever, some 85 years after the alleged
event. We scarcely need to ask how much truth is in them. (I note
as an aside that Matthew included the bit about the star, whereas
that was apparently an unimportant detail to Luke, since he omitted
it completely.) Luke included a vignette about Jesus as a 12-year-old
(2:41-51), something utterly lacking in the other three Gospels. The
Sermon on the Mount appears for the first time, though Matthew
has a much longer version than Luke. In the sermon we find a
number of famous sayings, all of which were never seen before:
“the meek shall inherit the earth” (Mt 5:5), “you are the light of the
world” (Mt 5:14), turn the other cheek (Mt 5:39; Lk 6:29), love thy
enemies (Mt 5:44; Lk 6:27), “cannot serve God and mammon” (Mt
6:24), “judge not” (Mt 7:1; Lk 6:37)—all now recorded, for the first
time, some 50 years after they supposedly occurred.
Followers must now virtually abandon their families for the
cause. “If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father
and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes,
even his own life, he cannot be my disciple” (Lk 14:26). These are
remarkably cult-like dictates, but perhaps appropriate for the
Jewish-led Christian movement.
Then we have passages of outright militancy. In Matthew,
Jesus says, “Do not think that I have come to bring peace on earth;
I have not come to bring peace, but a sword” (10:34)—how very
un-Christ-like! Luke has Jesus say, “I came to cast fire upon the
earth… Do you think that I have come to give peace on earth? No,
I tell you, but rather division” (12:49-51). Every man must do his
part: “let him who has no sword sell his cloak and buy one” (Lk
22:36). Jesus becomes downright ruthless: “as for these enemies of
mine, who did not want me to reign over them, bring them here
and slay them before me” (Lk 19:27). All this is necessary because

28
“the devil” rules all the kingdoms of the world (Lk 4:5-6). But not
to worry; if we all stick to the plan, and “this gospel of the kingdom
will be preached throughout the whole world,” then “the end will
come” (Mt 24:14). And so, sometime around the year 85, two new
Gospels were released into the world.
Once again, these apparently sufficed for a good decade or
so. But then one more member of the cabal, “John,” breaks rank
and moves in yet a different direction. He feels the need for an
intellectual and esoteric Jesus story, and so constructs a gospel using
abstract, almost philosophical terms and concepts. It ends up as
mid-length essay, between the short Mark and the longer
Matt/Luke. Miracles are still there, but they are now down-
played—just eight appear. We can imagine that John understood
that his new, more intellectual audience would likely not be taken in
by such nonsense…

“Saint” Paul and his Jewish cabal turn out to be blatant liars.
In fact, the epic liars of all recorded history.
Recall my explanation above, regarding how Paul and the
Gospel writers had two sets of enemies: the Romans and their
fellow elite Jews. In fact, they had a third enemy: the truth. Paul and
crew knew they were lying to the masses, but they didn’t care. The
Gentiles were always treated by the Jews with contempt, as I
showed in chapter four. They could be manipulated, harassed,
assaulted, beaten, even killed, if it served Jewish ends. This was not
a problem for them…
In the early 1500s Martin Luther—founder of the Lutheran
church—wrote a rather infamous book titled On the Jews and their
Lies. There he declared that “they have not acquired a perfect
mastery of the art of lying; they lie so clumsily and ineptly that
anyone who is just a little observant can easily detect it”—a
statement that could well be a motto for the present work. I also
note the striking irony of a man like Luther who was so opposed to
Jewish lies, even as he himself fell for the greatest Jewish lie of all.
In 1798, the great German philosopher Immanuel Kant
called the Jews “a nation of deceivers,” and in a later lecture he
added that “the Jews are permitted by the Talmud to practice
deceit”. In his final book, Arthur Schopenhauer made some
extended observations on Judeo-Christianity. He wrote, “We see

29
from [Tacitus and Justinus] how much the Jews were at all times
and by all nations loathed and despised.” This was due in large part,
he says, to the fact that the Jewish people were considered grosse
Meister im Lügen—“great master of lies”. Employing his usual blunt
but elegant terminology, Nietzsche saw it in this way:
In Christianity all of Judaism, a several-century-old
Jewish preparatory training and technique of the most serious
kind, attains its ultimate mastery as the art of lying in a holy
manner. The Christian, this ultima ratio of the lie, is the Jew
once more—even three times a Jew.
Similar comments came from express anti-Semites. Hitler
called the Jews “artful liars” and a “race of dialectical liars,” adding
that “existence compels the Jew to lie, and to lie systematically”.
And Joseph Goebbels, in his personal diary, wrote: “The Jew was
also the first to introduce the lie into politics as a weapon… He can
therefore be regarded not only as the carrier but even the inventor
of the lie among human beings”.
Finally, a remark by Voltaire seems relevant here. The Jews,
he said, “are, all of them, born with a raging fanaticism in their
hearts… I would not be in the least bit surprised if these people
would not someday become deadly to the human race”. If a Jewish
lie were to spread throughout the Earth, eventually drawing in more
than 2 billion people, becoming the enemy of truth and reason, and
causing the deaths of millions of human beings via inquisitions,
witch burnings, crusades, and other religious atrocities—well, that
could be considered a mortal threat, I think.
This, then, is my Antagonism Thesis: Paul and his cabal7
deliberately lied to the masses, with no concern for their true well-
being, simply to undermine Roman rule. This little group tempted
innocent people with a promise of heaven, and frightened them
with the threat of hell. This psychological ploy was part of a long-
term plan to weaken and, in a sense, morally corrupt the masses by
drawing them away from the potent and successful Greco-Roman
worldview and more toward an oriental, Judaic view.

7 I’ve been using cabal throughout the present text. It is, I

think, precisely the right word. A cabal is “a small number of persons
secretly united to bring about an overturn or usurpation, especially in
public affairs.” That’s a perfect description of Paul and his band.

30
 As we know, it took some time but the new Christian
religion did spread, eventually permeating the Roman world. In the
year 315, the emperor himself, Constantine, converted to
Christianity. In 380, Emperor Theodosius declared it the official
state religion.

Chapter 6: taking stock, looking ahead

Let’s take stock at this point by briefly recapping the central
facts. The oldest existing Bible dates from the year 350; as we move
backward in time from there, our confidence in the actual text
diminishes significantly—some parts being much more uncertain
than others. Expert consensus is that the four Gospels date to the
years 70 to 95 AD, and Paul’s letters to 50 to 70 AD. Paul, the
Gospel authors, Jesus, Joseph, the Virgin Mary, and all twelve
apostles were Jews. Many Jews had been in active and passive
resistance to Rome from virtually the beginning of the takeover in
63 BC. Between the years zero and 93 AD we have absolutely no
independent, corroborating evidence for such things as the
Bethlehem star, any of Jesus’ 36 miracles, any of the apostles’
miracles, or any of the Christian-specific events depicted in the
New Testament.

Critiquing antagonism
My thesis addresses the question of motive, something
that’s utterly lacking in the other skeptics.8 I have shown how the
Jews had a deep hatred for the Gentile masses and the Romans in
particular, and thus how individuals would have done anything—
including lie, and including placing themselves at mortal risk—to
benefit the Jewish people. The mythicists and other skeptics have
no good account of a motive… The Antagonism Thesis is by far
the most credible analysis. It best accounts for all the known facts,
and identifies an actual and fact-based motive for the whole
construction. All signs point to a Jesus hoax.

8Editor’s note: except for Eduardo Velasco, who in his

webzine Evropa Soberana published ‘Roma contra Judea; Judea contra
Roma,’ translated by us in The Fair Race. Apparently, Skrbina was
unaware of this work in Spanish.

31
 So, what’s the counter reply to the Antagonism Thesis? The
basic elements of it have been around for over a century. Obviously
it had been considered before and apparently rejected, since none
of the recent Jesus skeptics defend it. What would they say in reply,
to challenge that thesis? In fact I have raised this question with a
number of experts, precisely so that I could gauge the strength of
the thesis. Let me mention their comments and then offer my
responses.
“It’s not clear that all the Gospel authors, apart from Matthew, were
Jews. John certainly was not.”
As I’ve replied earlier, the Gospel of Mark was written for a
Gentile audience and thus takes on the superficial appearance of a
Gentile work. There is a strong consensus that Mark himself was
Jewish. The extensive OT references in all four Gospels argue
strongly for Jewish authorship. There is no real evidence that Luke
was a Gentile save his name, but as we know from Paul, it was not
unheard of for Jews to change to Gentile names. The scattered anti-
Jewish statements in all the Gospels—especially John—more reflect
an internal Jewish battle over ideology than an external, Gentile
attack. Paul is clearly and obviously Jewish.
“You are making sweeping generalizations. Not all Jews opposed
Rome, and not all NT writers and characters are necessarily Jewish.”
On the first point, of course, as I stated, many Jews
acquiesced to Roman rule. Probably a large majority accepted it,
even if begrudgingly. But the elite Jews were sure incensed, and
there was certainly a substantial minority of Zealots and others
violently opposed. My thesis doesn’t require that all or even most
Jews opposed Rome, only that a small band—Paul and friends—
did so, and acted on that basis. Regarding the NT writers, that’s
addressed above. Regarding the characters in the story—Jesus,
Mary, Joseph, et al—we can only go by the words written down,
and the text is conclusive: all were Jews.
One knowledgeable colleague listed a number of specific
problems for any such hoax theory:
• Needs a motive. Discussed above. The motive was revenge
against Rome, and an attempt to undermine its support by
confusing and corrupting the masses.
• The depiction of Jesus as Messiah conflicts with Jewish expectations
of the time. Certainly, and that’s why the majority of the Pharisees

32
opposed Paul’s gang. Paul didn’t concoct his hoax for the Jews; it
was strictly for the ‘benefit’ of the gullible Gentiles9…
There is no reason that the militant Jews would have given
up; rather, they changed direction. [S.G.W.] Brandon’s best defense
is that the last Gospel, John, does indeed drop all talk of revolution,
as I noted previously. But that is better attributed to John’s new,
more intellectual audience than to any utter resignation on the part
of the cabal. The main point, though, is that the apologists never
quite get around to explaining how exactly the Zealot thesis has
been “discredited.” And they can’t. They can point to Jesus saying
“love thy neighbor” and “turn the other cheek,” but that’s about it.
Let me take a moment to respond to a number of questions
that may arise at this point—some of which I’ve covered already,
and some not.
Question: “Okay, as a Christian I’ve read and absorbed your whole
shocking message. What am I supposed to do about all this?”
Answer: First, try to confirm as much of the evidence cited
here as possible. You have been swindled. Tell them you want your
money back. And your time. And your life—everything that you’ve
invested, and lost, in the most famous hoax in history.
Question: “What about all those pro-Roman, anti-war passages?:
‘Render unto Caesar’ (Mark 12:17), ‘let every person be subject to the
governing authorities’ (Rom 13:1), ‘pay your taxes’, ‘perish by the sword’ (Mt
26:52), ‘turn the other cheek’ (Mt 5:39)—not to mention, ‘love thy
neighbor’! Don’t these undermine your thesis?”
Answer: This is the “peaceable Jesus” reply. We all know
those famous lines, and they get repeated ad nauseum. My general
reply is (a) the Jewish cabal was compelled to insert such lines for
cover; too much explicit talk of rebellion was dangerous. Also (b)
these relatively few lines are outnumbered by far more that imply
rebellion and war—see my discussion in chapter five. And in any
case, “rendering to Caesar” says nothing about not also working for
his downfall. And sure, you may perish by the sword, but that’s
what happens in war. I particularly appreciate “love thy neighbor”:
Who, after all, was “the neighbor” if not the Jew?
Question: “The Jews come off looking pretty bad here. Isn’t all this
terribly anti-Semitic?”

9 Paul famously declared himself to be “Apostle to the

Gentiles” (Rom 11:13, Gal 1:16).

33
 Answer: People are overly sensitive these days, particularly
about Jews, probably because we hear so much about them and
anti-Semitism in the media… I see no good reason why Jews should
continue to merit special sensitivity, especially in light of Israeli
crimes in the middle East.
Question: “How could so many people be fooled for so long? It doesn’t
seem possible.”
Answer: Actually there have been several famous examples
in history when many people, even many smart people, have been
fooled for a very long time. The Donation of Constantine was a
fraudulent document in which Emperor Constantine allegedly gave
his empire to the Catholic Church in 315 AD. In fact it was forged
in the 700s and not exposed until 1440 by Lorenzo Valla.
Witches have been condemned and burned since at least
300 BC, and during the peak period in Europe—from 1450 to
1750—some 500,000 were killed. In all these cases, millions of
people were fooled, deceived, or otherwise attached to false beliefs
for centuries. It’s no surprise that millions could still be wrong.

Media, government, Hollywood

All the Abrahamic religions worship the Jewish God;
Muslims simply changed his name.
Governments everywhere want compliant populations.
They want citizens who will respect authority without question,
follow the laws, accept its power, and not be too inquisitive. They
like people who simply have faith in government, and who more or
less blindly trust them…
Colleges and universities are somewhat better, often having
panels or speakers who challenge the Christian view. But the
Antagonism Thesis is particularly difficult to discuss since it casts
blame on Jews, and any negative talk about them risks ostracism or
worse, even in our “liberal” and “free speech” universities.
What about our irreverent media and Hollywood
filmmakers—those who are so willing to commit sacrilege against
any social norm or moral standard? I suspect this has something to
do with the extensive role played by Jewish Americans. It’s
uncontroversial that Hollywood has been dominated by Jews for
decades; a relatively recent article in the LA Times cites Jewish heads

34
of nearly every major Hollywood studio.10 And it’s not just the
movie business. All the major media conglomerates have a heavy
Jewish presence in top management. If they should decide that
Jewish malevolence at the heart of the Christian story “looks bad,”
then they obviously won’t bring it up at all—not in the news, not
on TV, not in books…
“It is also difficult to imagine why Christian writers would invent such
a thoroughly Jewish savior in a time and place where there was strong suspicion
of Judaism.”
Actually, not difficult at all: the “Christian” writers were
Jews who were trying to build an anti-Roman church based on a
Jewish God and a Jewish savior.

Whither Christianity?
I rest my case. By all accounts, and despite protests to the
contrary, Christianity indeed seems to be a “cleverly devised myth”
(2 Pet 1:16)—a lie, a hoax—foisted upon the innocent and gullible
masses simply for the benefit of Israel and the Jews.
It’s in the Gospel of John that we read one of the bluntest
statements of truth, wherein Jesus says, “You [Gentiles] worship
what you do not know; we worship what we know, for salvation is
of the Jews” (4:22). We know what we are doing, say the Jews. You
Gentile Christians don’t even know what you’re worshipping—
which in fact is us and our God. But that’s okay. Just leave
everything to us; “salvation is of the Jews.”
But it’s Paul who’s really the star of this show. Paul comes
across as a masterly and artful liar—one of the all-time greats in
world history, a man who can lie with impunity about the soul, the
afterlife, God, everything. This unprincipled scoundrel, who admits
to being “all things to all men,” would do anything or say anything
to win his “kingdom of God” here on Earth. His mournful cries of
“I do not lie!” are revealed as nothing other than an inveterate liar
caught in the act.
With his fabricated “Jesus” and his fabricated “afterlife,”
Paul drained all value from this world, the real world. It turned
believers into weak and subservient sheep, ones whose lives are
oriented around the manufactured sayings of a marginal rabbi and
of prayer to Jehovah, the invisible God of the Jews.

10 “How Jewish is Hollywood?”, by Joel Stein (Dec 19, 2008).

35
 It took a few hundred years, but when enough people fell for
the hoax, it helped to bring down the Roman Empire. And when
people—lots of people—still believe it after two thousand years, it
cannot but degrade society, weighing us down, blocking us from
attaining that which we are capable of, that which was only hinted
at in the greatness of Athens and Rome. And all for the salvation of
the Jews.

______________

Editor’s Note: In six posts, we published these excerpts from The

Jesus Hoax on The West’s Darkest Hour (October 3-8, 2022).

36
 Interim report: Dominion
by the Editor
Although the author is a liberal, Dominion demonstrates the
main thesis of my website: Christian ethics governs today’s secular
West (a moral compass that, I would add, directs us to
ethnosuicide). The dust cover of Holland’s book contains these
words: ‘Today, the West is utterly saturated by Christian
assumptions… Christianity is the principal reason why, today, we
assume every human life to be of equal value.’ True, but Dominion, a
journey through Western history, is ultimately flawed. In the last
two chapters Holland cherry-picked cultural milestones from 1916
to 1967 skipping how World War II was a vicious conflict
perpetrated by Anglo-Americans who abhorred a pagan resurgence
in Europe (the Croatian intellectual Tomislav Sunic writes about
this in Homo Americanus).
Another matter that shows Dominion to be a cowardly book
on vital matters is that living in London where the most beautiful
specimens of Aryan women, called ‘English roses,’ still exist,
Holland failed to mention in a special chapter how the British elites
are exterminating this jewel of human evolution by promoting
mixed marriages on ubiquitous billboards that I myself have seen in
London. Given that the guiding premise of Dominion is that
Christianity has made us colour-blind since the time of St Paul, who
didn’t want us to distinguish between ‘Greek and Jew’ (i.e. Aryan
and Jew), to miss a golden opportunity to talk about how the
secular version of Christianity destroys the author’s own ethnicity is
unforgivable. But that is natural: in an anti-white System the book
of a true dissident—like Sunic’s—wasn’t elegantly published by a
prestigious publisher as Dominion is.
On far less important issues, Holland has apparently not
read Richard Carrier (Carrier’s On the Historicity of Jesus was published

37
five years before Dominion). Like David Skrbina, Holland believes
that Jesus existed, though he hastens to add that the only thing that
can be known about him is that he was crucified by the Romans
(before Dominion, Holland wrote a book about the last days of the
Roman Republic that became a bestseller). Holland hasn’t read
either Karlheinz Deschner’s ten volumes in German about
Christianity’s criminal history, and apparently didn’t realise, when he
was finishing Dominion, that his fellow countrywoman Catherine
Nixey was publishing a book accusing Christianity of destroying the
Greco-Roman world.11 Moreover, in late 2019 a video was uploaded
in YouTube in which Holland argued with another London scholar,
A.C. Grayling. Holland came across as not only ignorant in that
debate but emotionally sceptical of Grayling’s findings—I would
add Nixey’s and Deschner’s—that Judeo-Christians burned a huge
number of books in their wars against the classical world.
But all this is trivial compared to the fact that Dominion
starts from a premise that, in the right hands, could be used not
only to save the English roses from future extinction, but also the
rest of the Aryan population of the planet.

11 Catherine Nixey, The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction

of the Classical World (Macmillan Publishers, 2017).

38
 How Christianity became Neo-Christianity
(excerpts from Dominion) 12

Thomas Holland

First website entry: Antiquity

Something fundamental had indeed changed. ‘Patience in

tribulation, offering the other cheek, praying for one’s enemies,
loving those who hate us’: such were the Christian virtues as
defined by Anselm. All derived from the recorded sayings of Jesus
himself. No Christians, then, not even the most callous or
unheeding, could ignore them without some measure of reproof
from their consciences… God was closer to the weak than to the
mighty, to the poor than to the rich. Any beggar, any criminal,
might be Christ. ‘So the last will be first, and the first last.’ To the
Roman aristocrats who, in the decades before the birth of Jesus,
first began to colonise the Esquiline Hill with their marble fittings

12 Editor’s note: Tom Holland, Dominion: How the Christian

Revolution Remade the World (Basic Books, 2019). In The West’s Darkest
Hour I quoted, from October 2022 to March 2023, the excerpts I now
publish from that book. As I did with David Skrbina’s book, I add
ellipses between the unquoted passages.

39
and their flowers beds, such a sentiment would have seemed
grotesque…
No ancient artist would have thought to honour a Caesar by
representing him as Caravaggio represented Peter: tortured,
humiliated, stripped almost bare. And yet, in the city of the Caesars,
it was a man broken to such a fate who was honoured as the keeper
of ‘the keys of the kingdom of heaven’. The last had indeed become
first…
In the Middle Ages, no civilisation in Eurasia was as
congruent with a single dominant set of beliefs as was the Latin
West with its own distinctive form of Christianity. Elsewhere,
whether in the lands of Islam, or in India, or in China, there were
various understandings of the divine, and numerous institutions
that served to define them; but in Europe, in the lands that
acknowledged the primacy of the pope, there was only the
occasional community of Jews to disrupt the otherwise total
monopoly of the Roman Church.
Well might the Roman Church have termed itself ‘catholic’:
‘universal’. There was barely a rhythm of life that it did not define.
From dawn to dusk, from midsummer to the depths of winter,
from the hour of their birth to the very last drawing of their breath,
the men and women of medieval Europe absorbed its assumptions
into their bones. Even when, in the century before Caravaggio,
Catholic Christendom began to fragment, and new forms of
Christianity to emerge, the conviction of Europeans that their faith
was universal remained deep-rooted. It inspired them in their
exploration of continents undreamed of by their forefathers; in their
conquest of those that they were able to seize, and reconsecrate as a
Promised Land… Time itself has been Christianised.
How was it that a cult inspired by the execution of an
obscure criminal in a long-vanished empire came to exercise such a
transformative and enduring influence on the world? To attempt an
answer to this question, as I do in this book, is not to write a history
of Christianity. Rather than provide a panoramic survey of its
evolution, I have sought instead to trace the currents of Christian
influence that have spread most widely, and been most enduring
into the present day. That is why—although I have written
extensively about the Eastern and Orthodox Churches elsewhere,
and find them themes of immense wonder and fascination—I have
chosen not to trace their development beyond antiquity. My

40
ambition is hubristic enough as it is: to explore how we in the West
came to be what we are, and to think the way that we do…
Today, at a time of seismic geopolitical realignment, when
our values are proving to be not nearly as universal as some of us
had assumed them to be, the need to recognise just how culturally
contingent they are is more pressing than ever. To live in a Western
country is to live in a society still utterly saturated by Christian
concepts and assumptions. This is no less true for Jews or Muslims
than it is for Catholics or Protestants. Two thousand years on from
the birth of Christ, it does not require a belief that he rose from the
dead to be stamped by the formidable—indeed the inescapable—
influence of Christianity. Fail to appreciate this, and the risk is
always of anachronism.
The West, increasingly empty though the pews may be,
remains firmly moored to its Christian past. There are those who
will rejoice at this proposition; and there are those who will be
appalled by it. Christianity may be the most enduring and influential
legacy of the ancient world, and its emergence the single most
transformative development in Western history, but it is also the
most challenging for a historian to write about.
…although I vaguely continued to believe in God, I found
him infinitely less charismatic than the gods of the Greeks: Apollo,
Athena, Dionysus. I liked the way that they did not lay down laws,
or condemn other deities as demons; I liked their rock-star glamour.
As a result, by the time I came to read Edward Gibbon and his
great history of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, I was
more than ready to accept his interpretation of the triumph of
Christianity: that it had ushered in an ‘age of superstition and
credulity’. My childhood instinct to see the biblical God as the po-
faced enemy of liberty and fun was rationalised. The defeat of
paganism had ushered in the reign of Nobodaddy, and of all the
various crusaders, inquisitors and black-hatted Puritans who had
served as his acolytes. Colour and excitement had been drained
from the world. ‘Thou hast conquered, O pale Galilean,’ wrote the
Victorian poet Algernon Charles Swinburne, echoing the
apocryphal lament of Julian the Apostate, the last pagan emperor of
Rome. ‘The world has grown grey from thy breath.’ Instinctively, I
agreed.
Yet over the course of the past two decades, my perspective
has changed. When I came to write my first works of history, I

41
chose as my themes the two periods that had always most stirred
and moved me as a child: the Persian invasions of Greece and the
last decades of the Roman Republic. The years that I spent writing
these twin studies of the classical world, living intimately in the
company of Leonidas and of Julius Caesar, of the hoplites who had
died at Thermopylae and of the legionaries who had crossed the
Rubicon, only confirmed me in my fascination: for Sparta and
Rome, even when subjected to the minutest historical enquiry,
retained their glamour as apex predators. They continued to stalk
my imaginings as they had always done: like a great white shark, like
a tiger, like a tyrannosaur. Yet giant carnivores, however wondrous,
are by their nature terrifying.
The more years I spent immersed in the study of classical
antiquity, so the more alien I increasingly found it. The values of
Leonidas, whose people had practised a peculiarly murderous form
of eugenics and trained their young to kill uppity Untermenschen by
night, were nothing that I recognised as my own; nor were those of
Caesar, who was reported to have killed a million Gauls, and
enslaved a million more. It was not just the extremes of callousness
that unsettled me, but the complete lack of any sense that the poor
or the weak might have the slightest intrinsic value. Why did I find
this disturbing? Because, in my morals and ethics, I was not a
Spartan or a Roman at all. That my belief in God had faded over the
course of my teenage years did not mean that I had ceased to be
Christian. For a millennium and more, the civilisation into which I
had been born was Christendom. Assumptions that I had grown up
with—about how a society should properly be organised, and the
principles that it should uphold—were not bred of classical
antiquity, still less of ‘human nature’, but very distinctively of that
civilisation’s Christian past. So profound has been the impact of
Christianity on the development of Western civilisation that it has
come to be hidden from view. It is the incomplete revolutions
which are remembered; the fate of those which triumph is to be
taken for granted.
The ambition of Dominion is to trace the course of what one
Christian, writing in the third century AD, termed ‘the flood-tide of
Christ’: how the belief that the Son of the one God of the Jews had
been tortured to death on a cross came to be so enduringly and
widely held that today most of us in the West are dulled to just how
scandalous it originally was. This book explores what it was that

42
made Christianity so subversive and disruptive; how completely it
came to saturate the mindset of Latin Christendom; and why, in a
West that is often doubtful of religion’s claims, so many of its
instincts remain—for good and ill—thoroughly Christian. [pages 9-
17]

Second entry
Only the Jews, with their stiff-necked insistence that there
existed just a single god, refused as a matter of principle to join in
acknowledging the divinity of Augustus; and so perhaps it was no
surprise, in the decades that followed the building to him of temples
across Galatia, that the visitor there most subversive of his cult
should have been a Jew. The Son of God proclaimed by Paul did
not share his sovereignty with other deities. There were no other
deities. ‘For us there is but one God, the Father, from whom all
things came and for whom we live; and there is but one Lord, Jesus
Christ, through whom all things came and through whom we live’
(Romans 8.6).
Now, by touring cities across the entire span of the Roman
world, Paul set himself to bringing them the news of a convulsive
upheaval in the affairs of heaven and earth. Once, like a child under
the protection of a tutor, the Jews had been graced with the
guardianship of a divinely authored law; but now, with the coming
of Christ, the need for such guardianship was past. No longer were
the Jews alone ‘the children of God’ (Deuteronomy 14.1). The
exclusive character of their covenant was abrogated. The venerable
distinctions between them and everyone else—of which male
circumcision had always been the pre-eminent symbol—were
transcended. Jews and Greeks, Galatians and Scythians: all alike, so
long as they opened themselves to belief in Jesus Christ, were
henceforward God’s holy people. This, so Paul informed his hosts,
was the epochal message that Christ had charged him to proclaim
to the limits of the world.
‘There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor
female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus’ (Galatians 3:28-9). Only
the world turned upside down could ever have sanctioned such an
unprecedented, such a revolutionary, announcement. If Paul did not
stint, in a province adorned with monuments to Caesar, in
hammering home the full horror and humiliation of Jesus’ death,

43
then it was because, without the crucifixion, he would have had no
gospel to proclaim. Christ, by making himself nothing, by taking on
the very nature of a slave, had plumbed the depths to which only
the lowest, the poorest, the most persecuted and abused of mortals
were confined… To repudiate a city’s gods was to repudiate as well
the rhythms of its civic life. It was to imperil relations with family
and friends. It was to show disrespect to Caesar himself.
By urging his converts to consider themselves neither
Galatian nor Jewish, but solely as the people of Christ, as citizens of
heaven, he was urging them to adapt an identity that was as
globalist as it was innovative. This, in an age that took for granted
local loyalties and tended to look upon novelty with suspicion, was
a bold strategy—but one for which Paul refused to apologise. If he
was willing to grant the Law of Moses any authority at all, then it
was only to insist that what God most truly wanted was a universal
amity. ‘The entire law is summed up in a single command: “Love
your neighbour as yourself”.’ (Galatians 5.14) All you need is love.
Paul wrote to a second church, preaching the redemption
from old identities that lay at the heart of his message. Corinth,
unlike Galatia, enjoyed an international reputation for glamour. As
much as anywhere in Greece, then, Corinth was a melting pot. The
descendants of Roman freedmen settled there by Julius Caesar
mingled with Greek plutocrats; shipping magnates with cobblers;
itinerant philosophers with Jewish scholars. Identity, in such a city,
might easily lack deep roots. Unlike in Athens, where even Paul’s
greatest admirers found it hard to pretend that he had enjoyed
much of an audience, in Corinth he had won a hearing. His stay in
the city, where he had supported himself by working on awnings
and tents, and sleeping among the tools of his trade, had garnered
various converts. The church that he had founded there—peopled
by Jews and non-Jews, rich and poor, some with Roman names and
some with Greek—served as a monument to his vision of a new
people: citizens of heaven.
Among a people who had always celebrated the agon, the
contest to be the best, he announced that God had chosen the
foolish to shame the wise, and the weak to shame the strong. In a
world that took for granted the hierarchy of human chattels and
their owners, he insisted that the distinctions between slave and
free, now that Christ himself had suffered the death of a slave, were
of no more account than those between Greek and Jew. ‘For he
who was a slave when he was called by the Lord is the Lord’s

44
freedman; similarly, he who was a free man when he was called is
Christ’s slave’ (Corinthians 7.22). Like the great salesman that he
was, he always made sure to pitch his message to his audience. ‘I
have become all things to all men, so that by all possible means I
might save some’ (Corinthians 9.22). Despite this claim, and despite
the convulsive transformation in his understanding of what it meant
to be a Jew, in his instincts and prejudices he remained the product
of his schooling…
That the law of the God of Israel might be read inscribed
on the human heart, written there by his Spirit, was a notion that
drew alike on the teachings of Pharisees and Stoics—and yet equally
was foreign to them both. Its impact was destined to render Paul’s
letters—the correspondence of a bum, without position or
reputation in the affairs of the world—the most influential, the
most transformative, the most revolutionary ever written. Across the
millennia, and in societies and continents unimagined by Paul
himself, their impact would reverberate. His was a conception of
law that would come to suffuse an entire civilisation. He was
indeed—just as he proclaimed himself to be—the herald of a new
beginning.
Paul was not the founder of the churches in Rome.
Believers in Christ had appeared well before his own arrival there.
Nevertheless, the letter that he had sent these Hagioi from Corinth,
a lengthy statement of his beliefs that was designed as well to serve
as an introduction to ‘all in Rome who are loved by God’ (Romans
1.7) was like nothing they had ever heard before. The most detailed
of Paul’s career, it promised to its recipients a dignity more
revolutionary than even any of Nero’s stunts. When the masses
were invited by the emperor to his street parties, the summons was
to enjoy a fleeting taste of the pleasures of a Caesar.
But Paul, in his letter to the Romans, had something
altogether more startling to offer. ‘The Spirit himself testifies with
our spirit that we are God's children’ (Romans 8.16). Here, baldly
stated, was a status that Nero would never have thought to share. It
was not given to householders filthy and stinking with the sweat of
their own labours, the inhabitants at best of a mean apartment or
workshop on the outskirts of the city, to lay claim to the title of a
Caesar. And yet that, so Paul proclaimed, was indeed their
prerogative. They had been adopted by a god.

45
 To suffer as Christ had done, to be beaten, and degraded,
and abused, was to share in his glory. Adoption by God, so Paul
assured his Roman listeners, promised the redemption of their
bodies. ‘And if the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead is
living in you, he who raised Christ from the dead will also give life
to your mortal bodies through his Spirit, who lives in you’ (Romans
8.11). The revolutionary implications of this message, to those who
heard it, could not help but raise pressing questions. In the
cramped workshops that provided the Hagioi of Rome with their
places of assembly, where they would meet to commemorate the
arrest and suffering of Christ with a communal meal, men rubbed
shoulders with women, citizens with slaves. If all were equally
redeemed by Christ, if all were equally beloved of God, then what of
the hierarchies on which the functioning of even the humblest
Roman household depended?
The master of a household was no more or less a son of God
than his slaves. Everyone, then, should be joined together by a
common love. Yet even as Paul urged this, he did not push the
radicalism of his message to its logical conclusion. A slave might be
loved by his master as a brother, and renowned for his holiness, and
blessed with the gift of prophecy—but still remain a slave. Despite
his scorn for the pretensions of the Caesars, Paul warned the
churches of Rome not to offer open resistance to Nero. ‘Everyone
must submit himself to the governing authorities, for there is no
authority except that which God has established’ (Romans 13.1).
If Roman power upheld the peace that enabled him to
travel the world, then he would not jeopardise his mission by urging
his converts to rebel against it. Too much was at stake. There was
no time to weave the entire fabric of society anew. What mattered,
in the brief window of opportunity that Paul had been granted, was
to establish as many churches as possible—and thereby to prepare
the world for the parousia. ‘For the day of the Lord will come like a
thief in the night’ (I Thessalonians 5.2). And increasingly, it seemed
that the world’s foundations were indeed starting to shake…
In AD 66, the smouldering resentments of the Jews in
Judaea burst into open revolt. Roman vengeance, when it came, was
terrible. Four years after the launch of the rebellion, Jerusalem was
stormed by the legions. The wealth of the Temple was carted off to
Rome, and the building itself burnt to the ground. ‘Neither its
antiquity, nor the extent of its treasures, nor the global range of

46
those who regarded it as theirs, nor the incomparable glory of its
rites, proved sufficient to prevent its destruction’ (Josephus Jewish
Wars 6.442). God, whose support the rebels had been banking
upon, had failed to save his people. Many Jews, cast into an abyss of
misery and despair, abandoned their faith in him altogether. Others,
rather than blame God, chose instead to blame themselves,
arraigning themselves on a charge of disobedience, and turning with
a renewed intensity to the study of their scriptures and their laws.
Others yet—those who believed that Jesus was Christ, and whom
the Roman authorities had increasingly begun to categorise
as Christiani 13—found in the ruin visited on God’s Chosen People
the echo of an even more dreadful spectacle: that of God’s Son
upon the gallows.
The gospels written in the tense and terrible years that
immediately preceded and followed the annihilation of Jerusalem
were different [than Paul’s letters—Ed.]. The kingdom of God was
like a mustard seed; it was like the world as seen through the eyes
of a child; it was like yeast in dough. Again and again, in the stories
that Jesus loved to tell, in his parables, the plot was as likely to be
drawn from the world of the humble as it was from that of the
wealthy or the wise: from the world of swineherds, servants,
sowers.

Third entry
Naturally, not sharing Marcion’s contemptuous attitude
towards Jewish scripture, Irenaeus made sure to reinstate it at the
head of his own canon.14 It was, so he declared, essential reading for
all Christians: ‘a field in which hidden treasure is revealed and
explained by the cross of Christ’… Alongside Luke’s gospel, he
included John’s, and the two others most widely accepted as

13 Tacitus explicitly states that those condemned by Nero were

abusively referred to by the name of Chrestiani. Unsurprisingly, then,
neither in Paul’s letters nor in the Gospels does the word appear; but
already, by AD 100 at the latest, Christians themselves seem to have
begun to appropriate it.
14 Editor’s note: Ignatius (35-109 c.e.) was one of the church

fathers. On page 114 Holland wrote, ‘while travelling through Asia

Minor on his way to Rome, Ignatius, a bishop from Syria, had proudly
defined it as katholikos: “universal”.’

47
authoritative: one attributed to Matthew, a tax-collector summoned
by Jesus to follow him, and the second to Mark, the reputed
founder of the church in Alexandria. Compared to these, so
Irenaeus declared, all other accounts of Christ’s life and teachings
were but ‘ropes woven out of sand’…
In 212, an edict was issued that would have warmed the old
Stoic’s heart. By its terms, all free men across the vast expanse of
the empire were granted Roman citizenship. Its author, a thuggish
Caesar by the name of Marcus Aurelius Severus Antoninus, was a
living embodiment of the increasingly cosmopolitan character of
the Roman world. The son of an African nobleman, he had been
proclaimed emperor in Britain and was nicknamed Caracalla—
‘Hoodie’—after his fondness for Gallic fashions…
The interest that many Greeks took in Jewish teachings, and
that many Jews took in philosophy, had always been circumscribed
by the prescriptions of the Mosaic covenant. Christianity, though,
provided a matrix in which the Jewish and the Greek were able to
mingle as well as meet. No one demonstrated this to more fruitful
effect than Origen. A devotion to Christianity’s inheritance from the
Jews was manifest in all he wrote. Not only did he go to the effort of
learning Hebrew from a Jewish teacher, but the Jewish people
themselves he hailed as family: as the Church’s ‘little sister’, or else
‘the brother of the bride’. Marcion’s sneer that orthodox Christians
were Jew-lovers was not one that Origen would necessarily have
disputed. Certainly, he did more to embed the great body of Jewish
scripture within the Christian canon, and to enshrine it as an ‘Old
Testament’, than anyone before or since.
Jewish the great mansion of the Old Testament may have
been; but the surest method for exploring it was Greek. ‘Whatever
men have rightly said, no matter who or where, is the property of us
Christians.’ That God had spoken to the Greeks as well as to the
Jews was not a theory that originated with Origen. Just as Paul, in
his correspondence, had approvingly cited the Stoic concept of
conscience, so had many Christians since found in philosophy
authentic glimmerings of the divine. Just as traditions of textual
inquiry honed in Alexandria had helped Origen to elucidate the
complexities of Jewish scripture, so did he use philosophy to shed
light on an even more profound puzzle: the nature of God himself.
No one, after Origen’s labours in the service of his faith, would be
able to charge that Christians appealed only to ‘the ignorant, the

48
stupid, the unschooled’. The potency of this achievement, in a
society that took for granted the value of education as an indicator
of status, was immense.

Eusebius says in his Ecclesiastical History that, as a young

man, Origen paid a physician to surgically castrate him:
a claim which affected Origen’s reputation for centuries,
as demonstrated by these 15th-century depictions of
Origen castrating himself. In his times started the nonsense
that eventually received the name of ‘theology’ —Ed.
Origen had created a matrix for the propagation of
philosophical concepts that would prove to have momentous reach.
Far from damaging his reputation, his refusal to behave in the
manner of a conventional philosopher ended up only enhancing his
fame. Turning sixty, Origen could reflect with pride on a career so
influential that even the mother of an emperor, intrigued by his
celebrity, had once summoned him to instruct her in the nature of
God. Such fame, though, was as likely to stoke hostility as
admiration. The age was a treacherous one. The violence brought
by Caracalla to the streets of Alexandria had been an ominous
portent of even darker times ahead. In the decades that followed,
sorrows had come not as single spies, but in battalions. Caracalla
himself, murdered while relieving himself on campaign, had been
just one of a succession of emperors slain in a blizzard of
assassinations and civil wars…
The gods, it seemed, were angry. The correct religiones were
manifestly being neglected. The fault, in the wake of Caracalla’s
mass grant of citizenship, lay not just in Rome, but in the empire as

49
a whole. Accordingly, early in 250, a formal decree was issued that
everyone—with the sole exception of the Jews—offer up sacrifice
to the gods. Disobedience was equated with treason; and the
punishment for treason was death. For the first time, Christians
found themselves confronted by legislation that directly obliged
them to choose between their lives and their faith. Many chose to
save their skins—but many did not. Among those arrested was
Origen. Although put in chains and racked, he refused to recant.
Spared execution, he was released after days of brutal treatment a
broken man. He never recovered. A year or so later, the aged
scholar was dead of the sufferings inflicted on him by his torturers.
In the summer of 313, Carthage was a city on edge. An
ancient rival of Rome for the rule of the western Mediterranean,
destroyed by the legions and then—just as Corinth had been—
refounded as a Roman colony, its commanding position on the
coastline across from Sicily had won for it an undisputed status as
the capital of Africa. Like Rome and Alexandria, it had grown to
become one of the great centres of Christianity… In 303, when an
imperial edict was issued commanding Christians to hand over their
books of scripture or face death, Africa had been at the forefront of
resistance to the decree. The provincial authorities, determined to
break the Church, had expanded on the edict by commanding that
everyone make sacrifice to the gods.
A claimant to the rule of Rome named Constantine had
marched on the city. There, on the banks of the river Tiber, beside
the Milvian Bridge, he had won a decisive victory. His rival had
drowned in the river. Constantine, entering the ancient capital, had
done so with the head of his defeated enemy held aloft on a spear.
Provincial officials from Africa, summoned to meet their new
master, had dutifully admired the trophy. Shortly afterwards, as a
token of Constantine’s greatness, it had been dispatched to
Carthage.15

15 Editor’s note: Let us remember that the defeated

Carthaginians, a Semitic people, had such a grudge against Rome that
many had begun to take refuge in Judaism. But because of its
universalist character, Judeo-Christianity represented a much better
opportunity.

50
The Council of Nicaea
The fusion of theology with Roman bureaucracy at its most
controlling resulted in an innovation never before attempted: a
declaration of belief that proclaimed itself universal. The sheer
number of delegates, drawn from locations ranging from
Mesopotamia to Britain, gave to their deliberations a weight that no
single bishop or theologian could hope to rival. For the first time,
orthodoxy possessed what even the genius of Origen had struggled
to provide: a definition of the Christian god that could be used to
measure heresy with precision.
Never before had a committee authored phrases so far-
reaching in their impact [the Nicaean Creed—Ed.]. The long struggle
of Christians to articulate the paradox that lay at the heart of their
faith, to define how a man tortured to death on a cross could also
have been divine, had at last attained an enduring resolution. A
creed that still, many centuries after it was written, would continue
to join otherwise divided churches, and give substance to the ideal
of a single Christian people, had more than met Constantine’s
hopes for his council. Only a seasoned imperial administrator could
possibly have pulled it off. A century after Caracalla’s grant of
citizenship to the entire Roman world, Constantine had hit upon a
momentous discovery: that the surest way to join a people as one
was to unite them not in common rituals, but in a common belief.
When Donatists stripped a Catholic bishop naked, hauled
him to the top of a tower and flung him into a pile of excrement, or
tied a necklace of dead dogs around the neck of another, or pulled
out the tongue of a third, and cut off his right hand, they were
behaving in a manner that might have appeared calculated to baffle
the average Roman bureaucrat. Decades on from the deaths of both
Caecilian and Donatus, the killings continued, the divisions
widened, and the sense of moral certitude on both sides grew ever
more entrenched… Constantine, by accepting Christ as his Lord,
had imported directly into the heart of his empire a new,
unpredictable and fissile source of power.16 [Pages 123-136. The

16 Editor’s note: What Constantine didn’t suspect is that the

Christians infected the converts with the highly intolerant virus of
Judaism: a virus that would eventually infect the whole of
Christendom.

51
following quotes are taken from the chapter ‘Charity: AD 362’
which refers to Emperor Julian, called ‘The Apostate’ by his
enemies —Ed.]

Fourth entry
The shock of this cut Flavius Claudius Julianus to the quick.
The nephew of Constantine, he had been raised a Christian, with
eunuchs set over him to keep him constant in his faith. As a young
man, though, he had repudiated Christianity—and then, after
becoming emperor in 361, had committed himself to claiming back
from it those who had ‘abandoned the ever-living gods for the
corpse of the Jew’. A brilliant scholar, a dashing general, Julian was
also a man as devout in his beliefs as any of those he dismissively
termed ‘Galileans’. Cybele was a particular object of his devotions.
It was she, he believed, who had rescued him from the darkness of
his childhood beliefs. Unsurprisingly, then, heading eastwards to
prepare for war with Persia, he had paused in his journey to make a
diversion to Pessinus. What he found there appalled him. Even
after he had made sacrifice, and honoured those who had stayed
constant in their worship of the city’s gods, he could not help but
dwell in mingled anger and despondency on the neglect shown
Cybele. Clearly, the people of Pessinus were unworthy of her
patronage. Leaving the Galatians behind, he did as Paul had done
three centuries before: he wrote them a letter.
‘My orders are that a fifth be given to the poor who serve
the priests, and that the remainder be distributed to travellers and to
beggars.’ Julian, in committing himself to this programme of
welfare, took for granted that Cybele would approve. Caring for the
weak and unfortunate, so the emperor insisted, had always been a
prime concern of the gods.17
The heroes of the Iliad, favourites of the gods, golden and
predatory, had scorned the weak and downtrodden. So too, for all
the honour that Julian paid them, had philosophers. The starving
deserved no sympathy… The young emperor, sincere though he
was in his hatred of ‘Galilean’ teachings, and in regretting their

17 Editor’s note: It would have been magnificent if in the

classical world the Aryans, like the Jews, were only altruistic towards
the Aryans, as would be the case in the Third Reich.

52
impact upon all that he held most dear, was blind to the irony of his
plan for combating them: that it was itself irredeemably Christian.
‘How apparent to everyone it is, and how shameful, that our own
people lack support from us, when no Jew ever has to beg, and the
impious Galileans support not only their own poor, but ours as well.’
The wealthy, men who in previous generations might have boosted
their status by endowing their cities with theatres, or temples, or
bath-houses, had begun to find in the Church a new vent for their
ambitions. This was why Julian, in a quixotic attempt to endow the
worship of the ancient gods with a similar appeal, had installed a
high priest over Galatia and urged his subordinates to practise poor
relief. Christians did not merely inspire in Julian a profound
contempt; they filled him with envy as well.

St Martin
There was no human existence so wretched, none so
despised or vulnerable, that it did not bear witness to the image of
God. Divine love for the outcast and derelict demanded that
mortals love them too… ‘The bread in your board belongs to the
hungry; the cloak in your wardrobe to the naked; the shoes you let
rot to the barefoot; the money in your vaults to the destitute.’ The
days when a wealthy man had only to sponsor a self-aggrandising
piece of architecture to be hailed a public benefactor were well and
truly gone…
And if so, then Martin—judged by the venerable standards
of the aristocracy in Gaul—represented a new and disconcerting
breed of hero: a Christian one. Such was the very essence of his
magnetism. He was admired by his followers not despite but
because of his rejection of worldly norms. Rather than accept a
donative from Julian, he had publicly demanded release from the
army altogether. ‘Until now it is you I have served; from this
moment on I am a servant of Christ.’ Whether indeed Martin had
truly said this, his followers found it easy to believe that he had…
By choosing to live as a beggar, he had won a fame greater than that
of any other Christian in Gaul. The first monk in Gaul ever to
become a bishop, he was a figure of rare authority: elevated to the
heights precisely because he had not wanted to be. Here, for anyone
bred to the snobbery that had always been a characteristic of
Roman society, was shock enough.

53
 Yet it was not only the spectacle of a smelly and shabbily
dressed former soldier presiding as the most powerful man in Tours
that had provoked a sense of a world turned upside down, of the last
becoming first…

As a soldier, though, he did have his heavy military cloak;

and so, taking out his sword, he cut it in two, and gave one half to
the beggar. [pic above—Ed.] No other story about Martin would
be more cherished; no other story more repeated. This was hardly
surprising. The echo was of a parable told by Jesus himself. The
setting, as recorded in Luke’s gospel.18 [pages 137-149]

18 Editor’s note: No longer was Greco-Roman statuary, which

so beautifully displayed the superb Aryan beauty, the benchmark for
honouring the Aryan Gods. Now that the god of the Jews was in
charge, it was necessary to admire their antithesis. In the final pages of
the chapter, Holland informs us how the church reacted, thanks to the
rationalisations of its African theologian, St Augustine, to reconcile the
church’s love of riches with these Gospel passages. Yet Holland
informs us that Clovis, the founder of the Merovingian dynasty, used
to pray to St Martin: something which shows that even the most
ruthless warlord was already bowing down to the figure of the new
white hero, the so-called saint.

54
Fifth entry
A soothsayer lay buried nearby who, according to Homer,
had interpreted the will of Apollo to the Greeks, and instructed
them, at a time when the archer god had been felling them with his
plague-tipped arrows, how to appease his anger. Times, though, had
changed. In 391, sacrifices had been banned on the orders of a
Christian Caesar. Apollo’s golden presence had been scoured from
Italy. Paulinus, in his poetry, had repeatedly celebrated the god’s
banishment. Apollo’s temples had been closed, his statues smashed,
his altars destroyed. By 492, he no longer visited the dreams of
those who slept on the slopes of Gargano… In 391, the endemic
aptitude of the Alexandrian mob for rioting had turned on the
Serapeum and levelled it; four decades later, the worship of Athena
had been prohibited in the Parthenon.
By the end of the fifth century, it was only out in the wildest
reaches of the countryside, where candles might still be lit besides
springs or crossroads, and offerings to time-worn idols made, that
there remained men and women who clung to ‘the depraved
customs of the past’. Bishops in their cities called such
deplorables pagani: not merely ‘country people’, but ‘bumpkins’.
The name of ‘pagan’, though, had soon come to have a broader
application. Increasingly, from the time of Julian onwards, it had
been used to refer to all those—senators as well as serfs—who were
neither Christians nor Jews. It was a word that reduced the vast
mass of those who did not worship the One God of Israel, from
atheist philosophers to peasants fingering grubby charms, to one
vast and undifferentiated mass…
Certainly no Christian could imagine that it was enough
merely to have closed down their temples. The forces of darkness
were both cunning and resolute in their evil. That they lurked in
predatory manner, waiting for Christians to fail in their duty to
God, sniffing out every opportunity to seduce them into sin, was
manifest from the teachings of Christ himself. His mission, so he
had declared, was to ‘drive out demons’…
Gregory, though, had no illusions as to the scale of Rome’s
decline. A city that at its peak had boasted over a million inhabitants

55
now held barely twenty thousand. Weeds clutched at columns
erected by Augustus; silt buried pediments built to honour
Constantine. The vast expanse of palaces, and triumphal arches, and
race-tracks, and amphitheatres, constructed over the centuries to
serve as the centre of the world, now stretched abandoned, a
wilderness of ruins. Even the Senate was no more.
The rhythms of the city—its days, its weeks, its years—had
been rendered Christian. The very word religio had altered its
meaning: for it had come to signify the life of a monk or a nun.
Gregory, when he summoned his congregation to repentance, did
so as a man who had converted his palace on the Caelian into a
monastery, who had lived there as a monk himself, pledged to
poverty and chastity, a living, breathing embodiment of religio. The
Roman people, hearing their new pope urge them to repentance,
did not hesitate to obey him. Day after day, they walked the streets,
raising prayers and chanting psalms. Eighty dropped dead of the
plague as they went in procession…
The new Jerusalem and the lake of fire were sides of the
same coin. For the earliest Christians, a tiny minority in a world
seething with hostile pagans, this reflection had tended to provide
reassurance. The dead, summoned from their graves, where for
years, centuries, millennia they might have been mouldering, would
face only two options. The resurrection of their physical bodies
would ensure an eternity either of bliss or torment…
Monks who knelt for hours in sheeting rain, or laboured on
empty stomachs at tasks properly suited to slaves, did so in the
hope of transcending the limitations of the fallen world. The veil
that separated the heavenly from the earthly seemed, to their
admirers, almost parted by their efforts. ‘Mortal men, so people
believed, were living the lives of angels.’ Nowhere else in the
Christian West were saints quite as tough, quite as manifestly holy,
as they were in Ireland.
That the island had been won for Christ was a miracle in
itself. Roman rule had never reached its shores. Instead, sometime
in the mid-fifth century, Christianity had been preached there by an
escaped slave. Patrick, a young Briton kidnapped by pirates and sold
across the Irish Sea, was revered by Irish Christians not just for
having brought them to Christ, but for the template of holiness
with which he had provided them. Whether working as a shepherd,
or fleeing his master by ship, or returning to Ireland to spread the

56
word of God, angels had spoken to him, and guided him in all he
did; nor had he hesitated, when justifying his mission, to invoke the
imminence of the end of the world. A century on from Patrick’s
death, the monks and nuns of Ireland still bore his stamp. They
owed no duty save to God, and to their ‘father’—their ‘abbot’.
Monasteries, like the ringforts that dotted the country, were proudly
independent.

Patrick depicted with shamrock

in St. Benin’s Church, Ireland.

An iron discipline served to maintain them. Only a rule that

was ‘strict, holy and constant, exalted, just and admirable’ could
bring men and women to the dimension of the heavenly. Monks
were expected to be as proficient in the strange and book-learned
language of Latin as at felling trees; as familiar with the few,
ferociously cherished classics of Christian literature that had
reached Ireland as toiling in a field. Like Patrick, they believed
themselves to stand in the shadow of the end days; like Patrick, they
saw exile from their families and their native land as the surest way
to an utter dependence upon God. Not all headed for the gale-
lashed isolation of a rock in the Atlantic. Some crossed the sea to
Britain, and there preached the gospel to the kings of barbarous
peoples who still set up idols and wallowed in paganism: the Picts,
the Saxons, the Angles. Others, heading southwards, took ship for
the land of the Franks. [pages 159-174]

57
Sixth entry
The site of the [Jerusalem] Temple had been converted into
a rubbish tip, a dumping-ground for dead pigs and shit; Jews
themselves—except for one day a year, when a delegation was
permitted to climb Mount Moria, there to lament and weep—were
banned from Jerusalem; legal restrictions on their civic status grew
ever more oppressive. It was forbidden them to serve in the army;
to own Christian slaves; to build new synagogues. In exchange, Jews
were granted the right to live according to their own traditions—
but only so that they might then better serve the Christian people as
a spectacle and a warning. Now, with his abrupt new shift of policy,
Heraclius had denied them even that. So it was, in Carthage, that
the emperor’s policy was punctiliously applied. Any Jew who landed
in the city risked arrest and forcible baptism. All he had to do was
cry out in Hebrew when twisting an ankle, or perhaps expose
himself at the baths, to risk denunciation. 19
A new people, warriors who themselves claimed to be on an
exodus, had seized the rule of Africa; and the Africans, for the first
time in four hundred years, found themselves under the rule of
masters who scorned the name of Christian…
Few, if any, who fought at Poitiers would have realised it,
but at stake in the battle had been nothing less than the legacy of
Saint Paul. ‘For you are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy
nation, a people belonging to God.’ The Pope, when he quoted this
line of scripture in a letter to Pepin, was not merely flattering the
Franks, but acknowledging a brute reality. Increasingly, it was the
empire ruled by the heirs of Charles Martel—the Carolingians—
that defined for the papacy the very character of Christian rule. Paul

19Editor’s note: Having to see the dicks of a Jew to know that

he is a kike only shows that, even since those times, Mediterranean
miscegenation had already erased the emaciation line between Gentile
and Jew. From the time when such miscegenation was consummated
Rome was lost; Christianity only institutionalized that genetic reality.
Holland then devotes several pages to the greatest calamity of that
century: the irruption of Islam. We can already imagine the fate the
Arabs would have faced before genetically pure, pagan Romans
discovering both the scientific method and the industrial revolution.

58
I, unlike his predecessors, had failed to notify the emperor in
Constantinople of his election. Instead, he had written to Pepin.
The Byzantines, struggling for survival as they were against
relentless Muslim onslaughts, appeared to Christians in Rome—let
alone in Francia or Northumbria—an ever more alien and distant
people. Even more spectral were the lands that for centuries had
constituted the great wellsprings of the Christian faith: Syria and
Palestine, Egypt and Africa. The days when a man like Theodore
might freely travel from Tarsus to Canterbury were over. The
Mediterranean was now a Saracen sea. Its waters were perilous for
Christians to sail. The world was cut in half. An age was at an end.
[pages 180-198]

Seventh entry: Christendom

As dawn broke, the camp on the banks of the river Boorne
was already stirring. Boniface, its leader, was almost eighty, but as
tireless as he had ever been. Forty years after his first journey to
Frisia, he had returned there, in the hope of reaping from its lonely
mudflats and marshes a great harvest of souls. Missionary work had
long been his life. Born in Devon, in the Saxon kingdom of Wessex,
he viewed the pagans across the northern sea as his kinsmen. In
letters home he had regularly solicited prayers for their conversion.
‘Take pity upon them; for they themselves are saying: “We are of
one blood and bone with you”.’ Now, after weeks of touring the
scattered homesteads of Frisia, Boniface had summoned all those
won for Christ to be confirmed in their baptismal vows. It
promised him a day of joy.
The first boats arrived as sunlight was starting to pierce the
early morning cloud. A mass of men, after clambering onto dry
land, walked up from the river and approached the camp. Then,
abruptly, the glint of swords. A charge. Screams. Boniface came out
of his tent. Already it was too late. The pirates were in the camp.
Desperately, Boniface’s attendants fought back. Not the old man
himself, though. Christ, when he was arrested, had ordered Peter to
put up his sword; and now Boniface, following his Lord’s example,
commanded his followers to lay down their weapons. A tall man, he
gathered his fellow priests around him, and urged them to be
thankful for the hour of their release. Felled by a pirate’s sword, he

59
was cut to pieces. So violently did the blows rain down that twice a
book he had in his hands was hacked through. Found long
afterwards at the scene of his murder, it would be treasured ever
after as a witness to his martyrdom…

Fulda Sacramentary, St Boniface baptising

(top) and being martyred (bottom).

It was not the inheritance of Roman imperialism that

inspired them, but the example of Patrick and Columbanus. To
experience hardship was the very point. Fearsome stories were told
of what missionaries might face. Woden, king of the demons
worshipped by the Germans as gods, was darkly rumoured to
demand a tithe of human lives.20 In the Low Countries, prisoners
were drowned beneath rising tides; in Saxony, hung from trees, and
run through with spears. Runes were dyed in Christian blood. Or so
it was reported. Such rumours, far from intimidating Anglo-Saxon
monks, only confirmed them in their sense of purpose: to banish
the rule of demons from lands that properly belonged to Christ. As
vividly as anyone, they understood what it was to be born again.

20 Editor’s note: Compare this demonised vision of Woden

with the Wotan we see in the Wagnerian tetralogy; and remember that,
for the Christians who destroyed statues of Apollo and other Greco-
Roman gods, they too were ‘demons’.

60
‘The old has gone, the new has come!’ The tone of revolution in
Paul’s cry, the sense that an entire order had been judged and found
wanting, still retained a freshness for men like Boniface in a way
that it did not in more venerable reaches of the Christian world.
To banish the past, to overturn custom: here was a
fearsome project, barely comprehensible to the peoples of other
places, other times… Barely a decade after Boniface’s arrival in the
Low Countries, missionaries had begun to calculate dates in the
manner of Bede:21 anno Domini, in the year of their Lord. The old
order, which to pagans had seemed eternal, could now more firmly
be put where it properly belonged: in the distant reaches of a
Christian calendar. While the figure of Woden bestowed far too
much prestige on kings ever to be erased altogether from their
lineages, monks did not hesitate to demote him from his divine
status and confine him to the remote beginnings of things. The
rhythms of life and death, and of the cycle of the year, proved no
less adaptable to the purposes of the Anglo-Saxon Church. So it
was that hel, the pagan underworld, where all the dead were believed
to dwell, became, in the writings of monks, the abode of the
damned; and so it was too that Eostre, the festival of the spring,
which Bede had speculated might derive from a goddess, gave its
name to the holiest Christian feast-day of all. Hell and Easter: the
garbing of the Church’s teachings in Anglo-Saxon robes did not
signal a surrender to the pagan past, but rather its rout. Only
because the gods had been toppled from their thrones, melted
utterly by the light of Christ, or else banished to where monsters
stalked, in fens or on lonely hills, could their allure safely be put to
Christian ends. The victory of the new was adorned with the
trophies of the old.
The willingness of Boniface to meet death rather than
permit his attendants to draw their swords was not one that the
Frankish authorities tended to share. Three days after his murder, a
squad of Christian warriors tracked down the killers, cornered them
and wiped them out. Their women and children were taken as
slaves. [pages 201-207]

Editor’s note: Bede, who died in 735 c.e., was an English

21

monk, author and scholar.

61
Eight entry
In the summer of 772, fifty years after Boniface’s felling of
Thunor’s oak, another tree—the greatest of all the Saxons’
totems—was brought crashing down. Fearsome, phallic, and famed
across Saxony, the Irminsul was believed by devotees of the ancient
gods to uphold the heavens. But it did not. The skies remained in
their place, even once the sanctuary had been demolished. Yet to
the Saxons themselves, it might well have seemed as though the
pillars of the world were crumbling.
Devastation on a scale never before visited on their lands
was drawing near. The desecrator of the Irminsul was no
missionary, but a king at the head of the most menacing war-
machine in Europe. Charles, the younger son of Pepin, had
ascended to the sole rule of the Franks only the previous
December. Not since the vanished age of the Caesars had anyone in
the West commanded such resources. Prodigious both in his
energies and in his ambitions, he exerted a sway that was Roman in
its scope. In 800, the pope set an official seal on the comparison in
Rome itself: for there, on Christmas Day, he crowned the Frankish
warlord, and hailed him as ‘Augustus’. Then, having done so, he fell
before Charles’ feet. Such obeisance had for centuries been the due
of only one man: the emperor in Constantinople. Now, though, the
West had its own emperor once again. Charles, despite his
reluctance to admit that he might owe anything to an Italian bishop,
and his insistence that, had he only known what the pope was
planning, he would never have permitted it, did not reject the title.
King of the Franks and ‘Christian Emperor’, he would be
remembered by later generations as Charles the Great:
Charlemagne. Many were his conquests. During the four decades
and more of his rule, he succeeded in annexing northern Italy,
capturing Barcelona from the Arabs, and pushing deep into the
Carpathian Basin. Yet of all Charlemagne’s many wars, the
bloodiest and most exhausting was the one he launched against the
Saxons. There was more to the bloody rhythms of Frankish
campaigning, however, than the goal merely of securing for the new

62
Israel a troubled flank. Charlemagne aimed as well at something
altogether more novel: the winning of the Saxons for Christ. 22

Pope Leo III crowning Charlemagne.

Only by washing away all that they had been, and erasing
entirely their former existence, could they be brought to a proper
submission. In 776, Charlemagne imposed a treaty on the Saxons
that obliged them to accept baptism. Countless men, women and
children were led into a river, there to become Christian. Nine years
later, after the crushing of yet another rebellion, Charlemagne
pronounced that ‘scorning to come to baptism’ would
henceforward merit death. So too, he declared, would offering
sacrifice to demons [the Germanic Gods—Ed.], or cremating a corpse,
or eating meat during the forty days before Easter. Ruthlessly,
determinedly, the very fabric of Saxon life was being torn apart.
There would be no stitching it back together. Instead, dyed in gore,
its ragged tatters were to lie for ever in the mud. As a programme

22 Editor’s note: Holland writes about what this warlord, who

wanted to imitate King David, did in 782: in a single day he beheaded
4,500 Saxon prisoners who refused to worship the god of the Jews.
Christianity was imposed by force upon the white race. The Aryan
religions were destroyed by Constantine and his successors as well as
by Charlemagne and his successors: the architects of the Dark Ages. St
Paul was, in itself, harmless: it required imperial violence by Aryans to
impose his subversive ideas on white peoples.

63
for bringing an entire pagan people to Christ, it was savage as none
had ever been before. A bloody and imperious precedent had been
set.
Charlemagne, declaring in 789 his ambition to see his
subjects ‘apply themselves to a good life’, cited as his model a king
from the Old Testament: Josiah, who had discovered in the Temple
a copy of the law given to Moses. ‘For we read how the saintly
Josiah, by visitation, correction and admonition, strove to recall the
kingdom which God had given him to the worship of the true
God.’ [pages 207-211]

Ninth entry
From Scandinavia to central Europe, pagan warlords began
to contemplate the same possibility: that the surest path to profiting
from the Christian world might not be to tear it to pieces, but rather
to be woven into its fabric. Sure enough, two decades after the great
slaughter of his people beside the Lech, Géza, the king of the
Hungarians, became a Christian. Reproached by a monk for
continuing to offer sacrifice ‘to various false gods’, he cheerily
acknowledged that hedging his bets ‘had brought him both wealth
and great power’. Only a generation on, the commitment to Christ
of his son, Waik, was altogether more full-blooded. The new king
took the name Stephen; he built churches across the Hungarian
countryside; he ordered that the head be shaved of anyone who
dared to mock the rites performed within them; he had a rebellious
pagan lord quartered, and the dismembered body parts nailed up in
various prominent places. Great rewards were quick to flow from
these godly measures. Stephen, the grandson of a pagan chieftain,
was given as his queen the grand-niece of none other than Otto the
Great. Otto’s own grandson, the reigning emperor, bestowed on
him a replica of the Holy Spear. The pope sent him a crown. In
time, after a long and prosperous reign, he would end up
proclaimed a saint.
By 1038, the year of Stephen’s death, the leaders of the
Latin Church could view the world with an intoxicating sense of
possibility. It was not just the Hungarians who had been brought to
Christ. So too had the Bohemians and the Poles, the Danes and the
Norwegians. Ambitious chieftains, once they had been welcomed
into the order of Christian royalty, were rarely tempted to renew the

64
worship of their ancestral gods. No pagan ritual could rival the
anointing of a baptised king. The ruler who felt the stickiness of
holy oil upon his skin, penetrating his pores, seeping deep into his
soul, knew himself joined by the experience to David and Solomon,
to Charlemagne and Otto. Who was Christ himself, if not the very
greatest of kings? Over the course of the centuries, he ‘had gained
many realms and had triumphed over the mightiest rulers and had
crushed through his power the necks of the proud and the sublime’.
It was no shame for even the most peerless of kings, even the
emperor himself, to acknowledge this. From east to west, from
deepest forest to wildest ocean, from the banks of the Volga to the
glaciers of Greenland, Christ had come to rule them all.
Yet there was a paradox. Even as kings bowed the knee to
him, the hideousness of what he had undergone for humanity’s
sake, the pain and helplessness that he had endured at Golgotha,
the agony of it all, was coming to obsess Christians as never before.
The replica of the Holy Spear sent to Stephen served as a sombre
reminder of Christ’s suffering. Christ himself—unlike Otto—had
never borne it into battle. It was holy because a Roman soldier,
standing guard over his crucifixion, had jabbed it into his side.
Blood and water had flowed out. Christ had hung from his gibbet,
dead. Ever since, Christians had shrunk from representing their
Saviour as a corpse. But now, a thousand years on, artists had
begun to break that taboo. In Cologne, above the grave of the
archbishop who had commissioned it, a great sculpture was erected,
one that portrayed Christ slumped on the cross, his eyes closed, the
life gone from his body. Others beheld a similar scene in their
visions. [pages 218-220]

Tenth entry
‘The Pope is permitted to depose emperors.’ This
proposition, one of a number of theses on papal authority drawn up
for Gregory’s private use in March 1075, had shown him more than
braced for the inevitable blow-back. No pope before had ever
claimed such a licence; but neither, of course, had any pope dared
to challenge imperial authority with such unapologetic directness.
Gregory, by laying claim to the sole leadership of the Christian
people, and trampling down long-standing royal prerogatives, was
offending Henry IV grievously. Heir to a long line of emperors who

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had never hesitated to depose troublesome popes, the young king
acted with the self-assurance of a man supremely confident that
both right and tradition were on his side. Early in 1076, when he
summoned a conference of imperial bishops to the German city of
Worms, the assembled clerics knew exactly what was expected of
them. The election of Hildebrand, so they ruled, had been invalid.
No sooner had this decision been reached than Henry’s scribes
were reaching for their quills. ‘Let another sit upon Saint Peter’s
throne.’ The message to Gregory in Rome could not have been
blunter. ‘Step down, step down!’
But Gregory also had a talent for bluntness. Brought the
command to abdicate, he not only refused, but promptly raised the
stakes. Speaking from the Lateran, he declared that Henry was
‘bound with the chain of anathema’ and excommunicated from the
Church. His subjects were absolved of all their oaths of loyalty to
him. Henry himself, as a tyrant and an enemy of God, was deposed.
The impact of this pronouncement proved devastating. Henry’s
authority went into meltdown. Numerous of his princely vassals,
hungry for the opportunity that his excommunication had given
them, set to dismembering his kingdom. By the end of the year,
Henry found himself cornered. To such straits was his authority
reduced that he settled on a desperate gambit. Crossing the Alps in
the dead of winter, he headed for Canossa, a castle in the northern
Apennines where he knew that Gregory was staying. For three days,
‘barefoot, and clad in wool’, the heir of Constantine and
Charlemagne stood shivering before the gates of the castle’s
innermost wall. Finally, ordering the gates unbarred, and
summoning Henry into his presence, Gregory absolved the penitent
with a kiss. ‘The King of Rome, rather than being honoured as a
universal monarch, had been treated instead as merely a human
being—a creature moulded out of clay.’
The shock was seismic. That Henry had soon reneged on
his promises, capturing Rome in 1084 and forcing his great enemy
to flee the city, had done nothing to lessen the impact of Gregory’s
papacy on the mass of the Christian people. For the first time,
public affairs in the Latin West had an audience that spanned every
region, and every social class. ‘What else is talked about even in the
women’s spinning-rooms and the artisans’ workshops?’… The
humiliation of Henry IV had made visible a great and awesome
prize. The dream of Gregory and his fellow reformers—of a

66
Church rendered decisively distinct from the dimension of the
earthly, from top to bottom, from palace to meanest village—no
longer appeared a fantasy, but eminently realisable. A celibate
clergy, once disentangled from the snares and meshes of the fallen
world, would then be better fitted to serve the Christian people as a
model of purity, and bring them to God.

Emperor Henry IV, a suppliant to Pope Gregory VII.

Nevertheless, deep though the roots of

Gregory’s reformatio lay in the soil of Christian teaching, the flower
was indeed something new. The concept of the ‘secular’, first
planted by Augustine, and tended by Columbanus, had attained a
spectacular bloom. Gregory and his fellow reformers did not invent
the distinction between religio and the saeculum, between the sacred
and the profane; but they did render it something fundamental to
the future of the West, ‘for the first time and permanently’. A
decisive moment…
It was no longer enough for Gregory and his fellow
reformers that individual sinners, or even great monasteries, be
consecrated to the dimension of religio. The entire sweep of the
Christian world required an identical consecration. That sins should
be washed away; the mighty put down from their seats; the entire
world reordered in obedience to a conception of purity as militant
as it was demanding: here was a manifesto that had resulted in a
Caesar humbling himself before a pope. ‘Any custom, no matter
how venerable, no matter how commonplace, must yield utterly to
truth—and, if it is contrary to truth, be abolished.’ So Gregory had
written. Nova consilia, he had called his teachings—‘new counsels’. A
model of reformatio had triumphed that, reverberating down the

67
centuries, would come to shake many a monarchy, and prompt
many a visionary to dream that society might be born anew. The
earthquake would reach very far, and the aftershocks be many. The
Latin West had been given its primal taste of revolution. [pages 227-
231]

Eleventh entry
[Pope] Urban’s speech had reverberated to miraculous
effect. A great host of warriors drawn from across the Latin West
had taken a familiar road. As pilgrims had been doing since the time
of the millennium, they had journeyed across Hungary to
Constantinople; and then from Constantinople to the Holy Land.
Every attempt by the Saracens to halt them had been defeated.
Finally, in the summer of 1099, the great army of warrior pilgrims
had arrived before Jerusalem. On 15 July, they stormed its walls.
The city was theirs. Then, once the slaughter was done, and they
had dried their dripping swords, they headed for the tomb of
Christ. There, in joy and disbelief, they offered up praises to God.
Jerusalem—after centuries of Saracen rule—was Christian once
again.

So extraordinary was the feat as to be barely believable—

and the news redounded gloriously to the credit of the papacy.
Urban himself died a fortnight after the city’s capture, too soon for

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news of the great victory that he had inspired to reach him; but the
programme of reform to which he had devoted his life was much
burnished by the winning of the Holy City. Emperors since the time
of Charlemagne had fought wars of conquest beneath the banner of
Christ; but none had ever sent an entire army on pilgrimage.
Warriors present at the capture of Jerusalem reported having seen ‘a
beautiful person sitting atop a white horse’—and there were some
prepared to wonder if it might not have been Christ himself.
Whatever the truth of the mysterious horseman’s identity, one thing
was clear: the Holy City had been won, not in the name of any king
or emperor, but in that of a much more universal cause.
But what name to give this cause? Back in the Latin West,
the word starting to be used was one that, until the capture of
Jerusalem, had barely been heard. The warrior pilgrims, so it came
to be said, had fought under the banner of Christianitas:
Christendom. Such a categorisation—divorced as it was from the
dynasties of earthly kings and the holdings of feudal lords—was
one well suited to the ambitions of the papacy. Who better to stand
at the head of Christendom than the heir of Saint Peter? Less than a
century after Henry III had deposed three popes in a single year,
the Roman Church had carved out a role of leadership for itself so
powerful that Henry’s grandson, the son of Henry IV, was brought
in 1122 to sue for peace. In that year, in Worms, where his father
had once commanded Gregory VII to abdicate, Henry V agreed to
a momentous concordat. By its terms, the fifty-year-old quarrel over
the investiture of imperial bishops was finally brought to an end.
Although ostensibly a compromise, time would demonstrate that
victory was decisively the papacy’s. Decisive too was the increasing
acceptance of another key demand of the reformers: that the clergy
distinguish themselves from the great mass of the Christian
people—the laicus, or ‘laity’—by embracing celibacy. By 1148, when
yet another papal decree banning priests from having wives or
concubines was promulgated, the response of many was to roll their
eyes. ‘Futile and ludicrous—for who does not know already that it
is unlawful?’
Increasingly, then, the separation of church from state was
an upheaval manifest across the whole of Christendom. Wherever a
priest was called upon to minister to the laity, even in the humblest,
the most isolated village, there the impact of reformatio could be felt.
The establishment of the Roman Church as something more than

69
merely a first among equals, as ‘the general forum of all clergy and
all churches’, gave clerics across the Latin West a common identity
that they had not previously possessed. In the various kingdoms,
fiefdoms and cities that constituted the great patchwork of
Christendom, something unprecedented had come into being: an
entire class that owed its loyalty, not to local lords, but to a
hierarchy that exulted in being ‘universal, and spread throughout
the world’.
Emperors and kings, although they might try to take a stand
against it, would repeatedly find themselves left bruised by the
attempt. Not since the age of Constantine and his heirs had any one
man exercised an authority over so wide a sweep of Europe as did
the bishop of the ancient capital of the world. His open claim was to
the ‘rights of heavenly and earthly empire’; his legates travelled to
barbarous lands and expected to be heard; his court, in an echo of
the building where the Roman Senate had once met, was known as
the ‘Curia’. Yet the pope was no Caesar. His assertion of supremacy
was not founded on force of arms, nor the rank of his ministers on
their lineage or their wealth. The Church that had emerged from the
Gregorian reformatio was instead an institution of a kind never
before witnessed: one that had not merely come to think of itself as
sovereign, but had willed itself into becoming so. ‘The Pope,’
Gregory VII had affirmed, ‘may be judged by no one.’ All Christian
people, even kings, even emperors, were subject to his rulings. The
Curia provided Christendom with its final court of appeal. A
supreme paradox: that the Church, by rending itself free of the
secular, had itself become a state...
Much flowed from this formulation that earlier ages would
have struggled to comprehend. Age-old presumptions were being
decisively overturned: that custom was the ultimate authority; that
the great were owed a different justice from the humble; that
inequality was something natural, to be taken for granted. Clerks
trained in Bologna were agents of revolution as well as of order.
Legally constituted, university-trained, they constituted a new breed
of professional. Gratian, by providing them with both a criterion
and a sanction for weeding out objectionable customs, had
transfigured the very understanding of law. No longer did it exist to
uphold the differences in status that Roman jurists and Frankish
kings alike had always taken for granted. Instead, its purpose was to
provide equal justice to every individual, regardless of rank, or

70
wealth, or lineage—for every individual was equally a child of
God… 23
How, for instance, were the Christian people to square the
rampant inequality between rich and poor with the insistence of
numerous Church Fathers that ‘the use of all things should be
common to all’? The problem was one that, for decades, demanded
the attention of the most distinguished scholars in Bologna. By
1200, half a century after the completion of the Decretum, a solution
had finally been arrived at—and it was one fertile with implications
for the future. A starving pauper who stole from a rich man did so,
according to a growing number of legal scholars, iure naturali—‘in
accordance with natural law’. As such, they argued, he could not be
reckoned guilty of a crime. Instead, he was merely taking what was
properly owed him. It was the wealthy miser, not the starving thief,
who was the object of divine disapproval. Any bishop confronted
by such a case, so canon lawyers concluded, had a duty to ensure
that the wealthy pay their due of alms. Charity, no longer voluntary,
was being rendered a legal obligation.
That the rich had a duty to give to the poor was, of course, a
principle as old as Christianity itself. What no one had thought to
argue before, though, was a matching principle: that the poor had
an entitlement to the necessities of life. It was—in a formulation
increasingly deployed by canon lawyers—a human ‘right’. Law, in
the Latin West, had become an essential tool of its ongoing
revolution. [pages 233-239]

Twelfth entry
The Lady Elizabeth had been born to greatness. Descended
from a cousin of Stephen, Hungary’s first truly Christian king, she
had been sent as a child to the court of Thuringia, in central
Germany, and groomed there for marriage. At the age of fourteen,
she had joined Louis, its twenty-year-old ruler, on the throne. The
couple had been very happy. Elizabeth had borne her husband
three children; Louis had gloried in his wife’s demonstrable
closeness to God. Even when he was woken in the night by a maid

23 Editor’s note: Remember: for the Merovingian and Frankish

kings it was not the same to kill a blond-haired, blue-eyed man as it
was to kill a Mediterranean mudblood. But now all souls were equal in
the eyes of God.

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tugging on his foot, he had borne it patiently, knowing that the
servant had mistaken him for his wife, whose custom it was to get
up in the early hours to pray. Elizabeth’s insistence on giving away
her jewellery to the poor; her mopping up of mucus and saliva from
the faces of the sick; her making of shrouds for paupers out of her
finest linen veils: here were gestures that had prefigured her far
more spectacular self-abasement in the wake of her husband’s
death. Her only regret was that it did not go far enough. ‘If there
were a life that was more despised, I would choose it.’ When Count
Paviam urged Elizabeth to abandon the rigours and humiliations of
her existence in Marburg, and return with him to her father’s court,
she refused point blank…
Clerks in the service of the papal bureaucracy and scholars
learned in canon law had long been toiling to strengthen the
foundations of the Church’s authority. They understood the awful
responsibility that weighed upon their shoulders. Their task was to
bring the Christian people to God. ‘There is one Catholic Church of
the faithful, and outside of it there is absolutely no salvation.’ So it
had been formally declared during Elizabeth’s childhood, in 1215, at
the fourth of a series of councils convened at the Lateran. To defy
this canon, to reject the structures of authority that served to uphold
it, to disobey the clergy whose solemn prerogative it was to
shepherd souls, was to follow the path to hell.
In 1206, a one-time playboy by the name of Francis, a
native of the Italian city of Assisi, had spectacularly renounced his
patrimony. Taking off his clothes, he had handed them over to his
father. ‘Moreover he did not even keep his drawers, but stripped
himself naked before all the bystanders.’ The local bishop,
impressed rather than appalled by this display, had tenderly covered
him with his own cloak, and sent him on his way with a blessing.
Here, with this episode, had been set the pattern of Francis’ career.
His genius for taking Christ’s teachings literally, for dramatising
their paradoxes and complexities, for combining simplicity and
profundity in a single memorable gesture, would never leave him.
He served lepers; preached to birds; rescued lambs from
butchers. Rare were those immune to his charisma. Admiration for
his mission reached to the very summit of the Church. Innocent III,
the pope who in 1215 had convened the Fourth Lateran Council, was
not a man easily impressed. Imperious, daring and brilliant, he gave
way to no one, overthrowing emperors, excommunicating kings.

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Unsurprisingly, then, when Francis, at the head of twelve ragged
‘brothers’, or ‘friars’, first arrived in Rome, Innocent had refused to
see him.

St Francis’ renunciation of worldy goods by Giotto.

The whiff of heresy, not to mention blasphemy, had seemed

altogether too rank. Francis, though, unlike Waldes, never stinted in
his respect for the Church, in his obedience to its authority.
Innocent’s doubts were eased. Imaginative as well as domineering,
he had come to see in Francis and his followers not a danger, but an
opportunity. Rather than treating them as his predecessors had
treated the Waldensians, he ordained them a legally constituted
order of the Church. ‘Go, and the Lord be with you, brethren, and
as He shall deign to inspire you, preach repentance to all.’
By 1217, less than a decade after this proclamation, a
Franciscan mission had reached Germany. Elizabeth would grow
up profoundly inspired by its example. By dressing in secret as a
beggar, she had been paying tribute to Francis. Other
demonstrations of her enthusiasm for his teachings were more
public. In 1225, she provided the Franciscans with a base at the
foot of the Wartburg, in the town of Eisenach. Three years later,
following the death of her husband, she made her way there and
formally renounced her ties to the world. Yet no matter how
desperately she longed to do so, she did not then go begging from

73
door to door. Elizabeth had properly absorbed the lessons of
Francis’ example. She understood that to embrace poverty without
obedience was to risk the fate of Waldes. [pages 247-252]

Thirteenth entry
Anxieties in Paris were heightened by the discovery in 1210
of various heretics whose reading of Aristotle had led them to
believe that there was no life after death. The reaction of the city’s
bishop was swift. Ten of the heretics were burned at the stake.
Various commentaries on Aristotle were burned as well. Aristotle’s
own books on natural philosophy were formally proscribed. ‘They
are not to be read at Paris either publicly or in private.’ 24
But the ban failed to hold. In 1231, Gregory IX issued a
decree that guaranteed the university effective independence from
the interference of bishops, and by 1255 all of Aristotle’s texts were
back on the curriculum. The people best qualified to learn from
them, it turned out, were not heretics, but inquisitors. The days of
annihilating entire towns on the grounds that God would know his
own were over.25
The responsibility for rooting out heresy had now been
entrusted to friars. Taking the lead was an order that had been
established by papal decree back in 1216, to provide the Church
with a shock force of intellectuals. Its founder, a Spaniard by the
name of Dominic, had toured where the good men were to be
found, matching them in all their austerities, and harrying them in
debate. In 1207, two years before the annihilation of Béziers, he had

24 Editor’s note: The beginning of the Inquisition, the subject

of pages 252-256 of Dominion belongs rather to the work of Karlheinz
Deschner. Here I rather use Holland’s book to show how Christianity
reversed the values of the white man. One thing that is completely
overlooked on the racial right is that it is impossible to heal after
Christian infection unless whites repudiate the doctrine of the
immortality of the soul. No wonder the medieval freethinkers who
began to question this dogma ended up at the stake. No fear of hell,
no Church power.
25 Editor’s note: The author refers to Caedite eos: Novit enim

Dominus qui sunt eius! (‘Kill them: the Lord knows those that are his
own!’), a phrase reportedly spoken by the commander of
the Albigensian Crusade to eliminate Catharism in France.

74
met with a good man just north of the city, and argued publicly with
him for over a week. To friars schooled in this tradition of militant
preaching, Aristotle had come as a godsend.
The labour of reconciling Aristotle’s philosophy with
Christian doctrine did not come easily. Many contributed to it; but
none more so than a Dominican called Thomas, a native of Aquino,
a small town just south of Rome. The book he worked on between
1265 and his death in 1274, a great compendium of ‘things
pertaining to Christianity’, was the most comprehensive attempt
ever undertaken to synthesise faith with philosophy.
Thomas Aquinas himself died thinking that he had failed in
his efforts, and that, before the radiant unknowability of God,
everything he had written was the merest chaff; in Paris, two years
after his death, various of his propositions were condemned by the
city’s bishop. It did not take long, though, for the sheer scale of his
achievement to be recognised and gratefully acknowledged. In 1323,
the seal was set on his reputation when the pope proclaimed him a
saint. The result was to enshrine as a bedrock of Catholic theology
the conviction that revelation might indeed co-exist with reason. A
century after the banning in Paris of Aristotle’s books on natural
philosophy, no one had to worry that the study of them might risk
heresy. [pages 265-267]

Fourteenth entry
When workmen digging the foundations of a new house
uncovered the statue, experts from across Siena flocked to admire
the find. It did not take them long to identify the nude woman as
Venus, the goddess of love. Buried and forgotten for centuries, she
constituted a rare trophy for the city: an authentic masterpiece of
ancient sculpture. Few people were better qualified to appreciate it
than the Sienese. Renowned across Italy and far beyond for the
brilliance of their artists, they knew beauty when they saw it.
Everyone agreed that it would be a scandal for such a prize to be
hidden away. Instead, the statue was taken to the Campo, the city’s
great central piazza, and placed on top of a fountain. ‘And she was
paid great honour.’ At once, everything began to go wrong. A
financial crash was followed by a rout of the Sienese army. Then,
some five years after the discovery of the Venus, horror almost
beyond comprehension brought devastation to the city.

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 A plague, arriving from the east, and spreading with such
lethal virulence across the whole of Christendom that it came to be
known simply as the Great Dying, reached Siena in May 1348.

Leaders in the new governing council, looking from the

Palazzo Pubblico to the statue in the Campo outside, knew what to
blame. ‘From the moment we found the statue, evils have been
ceaseless.’ This paranoia was hardly surprising. Admiration for
ancient sculpture could not outweigh the devastating evidence for
divine anger. Almost eight hundred years before, during the
pontificate of Gregory the Great, it was cries of repentance that had
halted the plague. It was told how Saint Michael, standing above the
Tiber, had held aloft a blazing sword—and then, accepting the
Romans’ prayers, had sheathed it, and at once the plague had
stopped. Now, overwhelmed by calamity, the Sienese scrabbled to
show repentance.
On 7 November 1357, workmen pulled down the statue of
Venus. Hauling it away from the piazza, they smashed it into pieces.
Chunks of it were buried just beyond the border with Florence. The

76
insult offered by the honouring of Venus had been very great. Siena
was the city of the Virgin… Those who had demanded the
destruction of the Venus were right to see in its delectable and
unapologetic nudity a challenge to everything that Mary
represented.26

Catherine of Siena 27
From childhood, she had made a sacrifice of her appetites.
She fasted for days at a time; her diet, on those rare occasions when
she did eat, would consist exclusively of raw herbs and the
eucharist; she wore a chain tightly bound around her waist.
Naturally, it was with sexual yearnings that the Devil most tempted
her…
Not merely a virgin, she had been a bride. As a young girl
pledging herself to Christ, she had defied her parents’ plans to
marry her by hacking off all her hair. She was, so she had told them,
already betrothed. Their fury and consternation could not make her
change her mind. Sure enough, in 1367, when she was twenty years
old, and Siena was celebrating the end of carnival, her reward had
arrived. In the small room in her parents’ house where she would
fast, and meditate, and pray, Christ had come to her. The Virgin
and various saints, Paul and Dominic included, had served as
witnesses. King David had played his harp. The wedding ring was

26 Editor’s note: I have written about the differences between

Wagner and Nietzsche, and how the latter distanced himself from his
old friend when he realised that, despite rescuing Germanic paganism,
Wagner was making concessions to Christian morality. The first opera
I saw was Tannhäuser. I was very impressed that in the end the symbol
of Mary triumphed over the symbol of Venus in Wagner’s first
masterpiece, which is loaded with sexual symbolism. I didn’t expect to
find such a message. Contra Wagner, if we don’t understand
Christianity as Nietzsche understood it (in On the Genealogy of Morality,
1st treatise, § 8, § 16 and The Anti-Christ § 24, § 58-59 and § 61-62), the
white race will continue to die out until the end.
27 Editor’s note: She was a mystic, activist and writer who had

a great influence on Italian literature. Canonised after her death, she is

considered a Doctor of the Church by the Roman Catholic Church. By
1377, Catherine had become an antithesis of Venus: the most
celebrated paradigm of chastity in Christendom.

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Christ’s own foreskin, removed when he had been circumcised as a
child, and still wet with his holy blood.
Invisible though it was to others, Catherine had worn it
from that moment on. [pages 278-282]

Fifteenth entry
In Paris, as the great cathedral of Notre Dame was being
built, the offer from a collective of prostitutes to pay for one of its
windows, and dedicate it to the Virgin, had been rejected by a
committee of the university’s leading theologians. Two decades
later, in 1213, one of the same scholars, following his appointment
as papal legate, had ordered that all woman convicted of
prostitution be expelled from the city—just as though they were
lepers…
Yet always, lurking at the back of even the sternest
preacher’s mind, was the example of Christ himself. In John’s
gospel, it was recorded that a woman taken in adultery had been
brought before him by the Pharisees. Looking to trap him, they had
asked if, in accordance with the Law of Moses, she should be
stoned. Jesus had responded by bending down and writing in the
dust with his finger; but then, when the Pharisees persisted in
questioning him, he had straightened up again. ‘If any of you is
without sin, let him be the first to throw a stone at her.’ The crowd,
shamed by these words, had hesitated—and then melted away.
Finally, only the woman had been left. ‘Has no one condemned
you?’ Jesus had asked. ‘No one, Sir,’ she had answered. ‘Then
neither do I condemn you. Go now and leave your life of sin.’
Innocent III, that most formidable of heresy’s foes, never
forgot that his Saviour had kept company with the lowest of the
low: tax-collectors and whores. Endowing a hospital in Rome, he
specified that it offer a refuge to sex-workers from walking the
streets. To marry one, he preached, was a work of the sublimest
piety… Prostitutes themselves, perfectly aware of the example
offered them by the Magdalene, veered between tearful displays of
repentance and the conviction that God loved them just as much as
any other sinner. Catherine, certainly, whenever she met with a sex-
worker, would never fail to assure her of Christ’s mercy. ‘Turn to
the Virgin. She will lead you straight into the presence of her son.’
[pages 286-287]

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Sixteenth entry 28
The most popular preachers were those who condemned
the wealth of monasteries adorned with gold and sumptuous
tapestries, and demanded a return to the stern simplicity of the early
days of the Church. The Christian people, they warned, had taken a
desperately wrong turn. The reforms of Gregory VII, far from
serving to redeem the Church, had set it instead upon a path to
corruption. The papacy, seduced by the temptations of earthly
glory, had forgotten that the Gospels spoke most loudly to the
poor, to the humble, to the suffering. ‘The cross of Jesus Christ and
the name of the crucified Jesus are now brought into disrepute and
made as it were alien and void among Christians.’ Only Antichrist
could have wrought such a fateful, such a hellish abomination. And
so it was, in the streets of Prague, that it had become a common
thing to paint the pope as the beast foretold by Saint John, and to
show him wearing the papal crown, but with the feet of a
monstrous bird.
In the wake of Hus’ execution, denunciations of the papacy
as Antichrist had begun to be made openly across Prague. Of

28 Editor’s note: One might think that the egalitarian mass

psychoses of our time are a modern and postmodern phenomenon.
But militant, even violent egalitarianism has ancient Christian roots.
The term Hussites or Hussite Church refers to a reform and
revolutionary movement that arose in Bohemia in the 15th century.
The name comes from the Bohemian theologian Jan Hus, who had
been burnt at the stake. The movement later joined the Reformation.
A town was founded in 1420 by a group of the most radical wing of
the Hussites, who gave it the biblical name of ‘Tabor’: the mountain
where, according to the gospels, the transfiguration of Jesus took
place. The members of this radical wing soon became known as
Taborites and the word Tabor has come to mean in Czech ‘camp’. The
radical Hussites established a communal society in Tabor in which
private property didn’t exist and any religious hierarchy was rejected.
The egalitarian experiment lasted only one year, for in 1421 a moderate
Hussite faction overran the Taborite fiefdom. The town was rebuilt in
the 16th century. In the chapter ‘Apocalypse, 1420: Tabor’ Holland
writes the following.

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Sigismund as well—for it was presumed that it was by his treachery
that Hus had been delivered up to the flames.

Taborites taking Communion in the open air.

The Taborites were hardly the first Christians to believe

themselves living in the shadow of Apocalypse. The novelty lay
rather in the scale of the crisis that had prompted their imaginings:
one in which all the traditional underpinnings of society, all the
established frameworks of authority, appeared fatally compromised.
Confronted by a church that was the swollen body of Antichrist,
and an emperor guilty of the most blatant treachery, the Taborites
had pledged themselves to revolution. But it was not enough merely
to return to the ideals of the early church: to live equally as brothers
and sisters; to share everything in common. The filth of the world
beyond Tabor, where those who had not fled to the mountains still
wallowed in corruption, had to be swept away too. Its entire order
was rotten. ‘All kings, princes and prelates of the church will cease
to be.’ This manifesto, against the backdrop of Sigismund’s
determination to break the Hussites, and the papacy’s declaration of
a crusade against them, was one calculated to steel the Taborites for
the looming struggle. Yet it was not only emperors and popes
whom they aspired to eliminate. All those who had rejected the
summons to Tabor, to redeem themselves from the fallen world,
were sinners. ‘Each of the faithful ought to wash his hands in the
blood of Christ's foes.’
Many Hussites, confronted by this unsparing refusal to turn
the other cheek, were appalled. ‘Heresy and tyrannical cruelty,’ one

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of them termed it. Others muttered darkly about a rebirth of
Donatism. The summer of 1420, though, was no time for the
moderates to be standing on their principles. The peril was too
great. In May, at the head of a great army of crusaders summoned
from across Christendom, Sigismund advanced on Prague. Ruin of
the kind visited on Béziers two centuries earlier now directly
threatened the city. Moderates and radicals alike accepted that they
had no choice but to make common cause. The Taborites, leaving
behind only a skeleton garrison, duly marched to the relief of
Babylon. At their head rode a general of genius. Jan Žižka, one-eyed
and sixty years old, was to prove the military saviour that the
Albigensians had never found. That July, looking to break the
besiegers’ attempt to starve Prague into submission, he launched a
surprise attack so devastating that Sigismund was left with no
choice but to withdraw. Further victories quickly followed. Žižka
proved irresistible. Not even the loss late in 1421 of his remaining
eye to an arrow served to handicap him. Crusaders, imperial
garrisons, rival Hussite factions: he routed them all. Innovative and
brutal in equal measure, Žižka was the living embodiment of the
Taborite revolution. Noblemen on their chargers he met with rings
of armoured wagons, hauled from muddy farmyards and manned
by peasants equipped with muskets; monks he would order burnt at
the stake, or else personally club to death. Never once did the grim
old man meet with defeat. By 1424, when he finally fell sick and
died, all of Bohemia had been brought under Taborite rule…
Readying Prague for their Lord’s arrival, they had
systematically targeted symbols of privilege. Monasteries were
levelled; the bushy moustaches much favoured by the Bohemian
elite forcibly shaved off wherever they were spotted; the skull of a
recently deceased king dug up and crowned with straw. As the
months and then the years passed, however, and still Christ failed to
appear, so the radicalism of the Taborites had begun to fade. They
had elected a bishop; negotiated to secure a king; charged the most
extreme in their ranks with heresy and expelled them from Tabor.
Žižka, displaying a brusque lack of concern for legal process that no
inquisitor would ever have contemplated emulating, had rounded
up fifty of them and burnt the lot.29 Well before the abrupt and

29 Only one man was spared, to provide an account of his

sect’s beliefs.

81
crushing defeat of the Taborites by a force of more moderate
Hussites in 1434, the flame of their movement had been guttering.
Christ had not returned. The world had not been purged of kings.
Tabor had not, after all, been crowned the New Jerusalem. In 1436,
when Hussite ambassadors—achieving a startling first for a
supposedly heretical sect—succeeded in negotiating a concordat
directly with the papacy, the Taborites had little choice but to
accept it. There would be time enough, at the end of days, to defy
the order of the world. But until it came, until Christ returned in
glory, what option was there except to compromise? [pages 295-
300]

Seventeen entry
During the course of a voyage blighted by storms, hostile
natives and a year spent marooned on Jamaica, Columbus’ mission
was confirmed for him directly by a voice from heaven. Speaking
gently, it chided him for his despair, and hailed him as a new Moses.
Just as the Promised Land had been granted to the Children of
Israel, so had the New World been granted to Spain. Writing to
Ferdinand and Isabella about this startling development, Columbus
insisted reassuringly that it had all been prophesied by Joachim of
Fiore. Not for nothing did his own name mean ‘the dove’, that
emblem of the Holy Spirit. The news of Christ would be brought to
the New World, and its treasure used to rebuild the Temple in
Jerusalem…
In 1519, more than a decade after Columbus’ death, a
Spanish adventurer named Hernán Cortés disembarked with five
hundred men on the shore of an immense landmass that was
already coming to be called America. Informed that there lay inland
the capital of a great empire, Cortés took the staggeringly bold
decision to head for it. He and his men were stupefied by what they
found: a fantastical vision of lakes and towering temples, radiating
‘flashes of light like quetzal plumes’, immensely vaster than any city
in Spain. Canals bustled with canoes; flowers hung over the
waterways. Tenochtitlan, wealthy and beautiful, was a monument to
the formidable prowess of the conquerors who had built it: the
Mexica. Without sacrifice, so the Mexica believed, the gods would
weaken, chaos descend, and the sun start to fade. Only chalchiuatl,

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the ‘precious water’ pumped out by a still-beating heart, could serve
to feed it.

Only blood, in the final reckoning, could prevent the

universe from winding down. To the Spaniards, the spectacle of
dried gore on the steps of Tenochtitlan’s pyramids, of skulls
grinning out from racks, was literally hellish. Once Cortés, in a feat
of unparalleled audacity and aggression, had succeeded in making
himself the master of the great city, its temples were razed to the
ground. So Charlemagne, smashing with his mailed horsemen
through dripping forests, had trampled down the shrines of Woden
and Thunor. The Mexica, who had neither horses nor steel, let
alone cannon, found themselves as powerless as the Saxons had
once been to withstand Christian arms.30 [pages 304-305]

Eighteenth entry
In 1516, any lingering hopes that Ferdinand might prove to
be the last emperor were put to rest by his death. He had not led a
great crusade to reconquer Jerusalem; Islam had not been
destroyed. Nevertheless, the achievements of Ferdinand’s reign had
been formidable. His grandson, Charles, succeeded to the rule of
the most powerful kingdom in Christendom, and to a sway more
authentically globe-spanning than that of the Caesars. Spaniards felt
no sense of inferiority when they compared their swelling empire to
Rome’s. Quite the contrary. From lands unknown to the ancients

30 Editor’s note: And precisely because Catholics profess a

universalist religion, and all are equal in the eyes of their god, the first
thing the Spaniards did in ancient Mexico was to mate with
Amerindian women.

83
came news of feats that would have done credit to Alexander: the
toppling against all the odds of mighty kingdoms; the winning of
dazzling fortunes; men who had come from nowhere to live like
kings.

Yet there lay over the brilliance of these achievements a pall

of anxiety. No people in antiquity would ever have succeeded in
winning an empire for themselves had they doubted their licence to
slaughter and enslave the vanquished; but Christians could not so
readily be innocent in their cruelty. When scholars in Europe
sought to justify the Spanish conquest of the New World, they
reached not for the Church Fathers, but for Aristotle. ‘As the
Philosopher says, it is clear that some men are slaves by nature and
others free by nature.’ Even in the Indies, though, there were
Spaniards who worried whether this was truly so. ‘Tell me,’ a
Dominican demanded of his fellow settlers, eight years before
Cortés took the road to Tenochtitlan, ‘by what right or justice do
you keep these Indians in such a cruel and horrible servitude? On
what authority have you waged a detestable war against these
people, who dwelt quietly and peacefully in their own land?’ 31

31 Editor’s note: This Dominican was Antonio de Montesinos,

a Spanish missionary and friar. Together with the first community of
Dominicans in the American continent, led by the vicar Fray Pedro de
Córdoba, he distinguished himself in the defence of the Indians from
the Spanish colonisers.

84
 Most of the friar’s congregation, too angered to reflect on
his questions, contented themselves with issuing voluble complaints
to the local governor, and agitating for his removal; but there were
some colonists who did find their consciences pricked. Increasingly,
adventurers in the New World had to reckon with condemnation of
their exploits as cruelty, oppression, greed. Some, on occasion,
might even come to this realisation themselves. The most dramatic
example occurred in 1514, when a colonist in the West Indies had
his life upended by a sudden, heart-stopping insight: that his
enslavement of Indians was a mortal sin.
Like Paul on the road to Damascus, like Augustine in the
garden, Bartolomé de Las Casas found himself born again. Freeing
his slaves, he devoted himself from that moment on to defending
the Indians from tyranny. Only the cause of bringing them to God,
he argued, could possibly justify Spain’s rule of the New World; and
only by means of persuasion might they legitimately be brought to
God. ‘For they are our brothers, and Christ gave his life for
them.’ Las Casas, whether on one side of the Atlantic, pleading his
case at the royal court, or on the other, in straw-thatched colonial
settlements, never doubted that his convictions derived from the
mainstream of Christian teaching. [pages 307-308]

Nineteenth entry
Luther had come to believe that true reformatio would be
impossible without consigning canons, papal decrees and Aquinas’
philosophy to the flames. Then, in the wake of his meeting with the
cardinal, he had come to an even more subversive conclusion…
Now, travelling to the diet, Luther was greeted with matching
displays of exuberance. Welcoming committees toasted him at the
gates of city after city; crowds crammed into churches to hear him
preach. As he entered Worms, thousands thronged the streets to
catch a glimpse of the man of the hour.
The founding claim of the order promoted by Gregory VII,
that the clergy were an order of men radically distinct from the laity,
was a swindle and a blasphemy. ‘A Christian man is a perfectly free
lord of all, and subject to none.’ So Luther had declared a month
before his excommunication, in a pamphlet that he had pointedly
sent to the pope. ‘A Christian is a perfectly dutiful servant of all,
subject to all.’ The ceremonies of the Church could not redeem

85
men and women from hell, for it was only God who possessed that
power. A priest who laid claim to it by virtue of his celibacy was
playing a confidence trick on both his congregation and himself. So
lost were mortals to sin that nothing they did, no displays of charity,
no mortifications of the flesh, no pilgrimages to gawp at relics,
could possibly save them. Only divine love could do that. Salvation
was not a reward. Salvation was a gift.32 It was in the certitude of
this that Luther, the day after his first appearance before Charles V,
returned to the bishop’s palace. Asked again if he would renounce
his writings, he said that he would not. As dusk thickened, and
torches were lit in the crowded hall, Luther fixed his glittering black
eyes on his interrogator and boldly scorned all the pretensions of
popes and councils. Instead, so he declared, he was bound only by
the understanding of scripture that had been revealed to him by the
Spirit. ‘My conscience is captive to the Word of God. I cannot and
I will not retract anything, since it is neither safe nor right to go
against conscience.’

Luther as an Augustinian friar.

Two days after listening to this bravura display of defiance,

Charles V wrote a reply. Obedient to the example of his forebears,
he vowed, he would always be a defender of the Catholic faith, ‘the
sacred rituals, decrees, ordinances and holy customs’. He therefore

32 Editor’s note: Once more: the schizophrenogenic (i.e., it

drives you mad) doctrine of salvation from eternal torture thanks to a
Semitic god imposed on whites.

86
had no hesitation in confirming Luther’s excommunication.
Nevertheless, he was a man of his word. The promise of safe
passage held. Luther was free to depart. He had three weeks to get
back to Wittenberg. After that, he would be liable for ‘liquidation’.
Luther, leaving Worms, did so as both a hero and an outlaw.
The drama of it all, reported in pamphlets that flooded the empire,
only compounded his celebrity. Then, halfway back to Wittenberg,
another astonishing twist. Travelling in their wagon through
Thuringia, Luther and his party were ambushed in a ravine. A posse
of horsemen, pointing their crossbows at the travellers, abducted
Luther and two of his companions. The fading hoofbeats left
behind them nothing but dust. As to who might have taken Luther,
and why, there was no clue. Months passed, and still no one seemed
any the wiser. It was as though he had simply vanished into thin air.
All the while, though, Luther was in the Wartburg. The castle
belonged to Friedrich, whose men had brought him there for safe-
keeping. Disguised as a knight, with two servant boys to attend him,
but no one to argue with, no one to address, he was miserable. The
devil nagged him with temptations. Once, when a strange dog came
padding into his room, Luther—who loved dogs dearly—identified
it as a demon and threw it out of his tower window.
He suffered terribly from constipation. ‘Now I sit in pain
like a woman in childbirth, ripped up, bloody.’ He did not, as Saint
Elizabeth had done when she lived in the castle, welcome suffering.
He had come to understand that he could never be saved by good
works. It was in the Wartburg that Luther abandoned forever the
disciplines of his life as a monk. Instead, he wrote. Lonely in his
eyrie, he could look down at the town of Eisenach, where Hilten
had prophesied the coming of a great reformer, and believe
himself—despite his isolation from the mighty convulsions that he
himself had set in train—to be the man foretold…
Now, with his translation, Luther had given Germans
everywhere the chance to do the same. All the structures and the
traditions of the Roman Church, its hierarchies, and its canons, and
its philosophy, had served merely to render scripture an entrapped
and feeble thing, much as lime might prevent a bird from taking
wing. By liberating it, Luther had set Christians everywhere free to
experience it as he had experienced it: as the means to hear God’s
living voice. Opening their hearts to the Spirit, they would
understand the true meaning of Christianity, just as he had come to

87
understand it. There would be no need for discipline, no need for
authority. Antichrist would be routed. All the Christian people at
long last would be as one.33 [pages 317-321]

Twentieth entry
Henry VIII—who, as king of England, lived in fuming
resentment of the much greater prestige enjoyed by the emperor
and the king of France—had been mightily pleased to have
negotiated the title of Defender of the Faith for himself from
Rome. It had not taken long, though, for relations between him and
the papacy to take a spectacular turn for the worse. In 1527,
depressed by a lack of sons and obsessed by a young noblewoman
named Anne Boleyn, Henry convinced himself that God had cursed
his marriage. As wilful as he was autocratic, he demanded an
annulment. The pope refused. Not only was Henry’s case one to
make any respectable canon lawyer snort, but his wife, Catherine of
Aragon, was the daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella—which meant
in turn that she was the aunt of Charles V. Anxious though the
pope might be to keep the English king on side, his prime concern
was not to offend Christendom’s most powerful monarch.
Henry, under normal circumstances, would have had little
option but to admit defeat. The circumstances, though, were hardly
normal. Henry had an alternative recourse to hand. He did not have
to accept Luther’s views on grace or scripture to relish the
reformer’s hostility to the pope. Opportunistic to the point of
megalomania, the king seized his chance. In 1534, papal authority
was formally repudiated by act of parliament. Henry was declared
‘the only supreme head on Earth of the Church of England’.

33 Editor’s note: Nietzsche blamed Luther and Germany for

the darkness that would flood the post-Renaissance mind. According

to Nietzsche, when visiting Rome Luther should have knelt in true
grace, with tears in his eyes as he saw how Renaissance sculpture
hinted at a coming transvaluation of all values (keep in mind what
happened to the statue of Venus at the hands of superstitious
Christians). But the Augustinian friar would do the opposite: he thrust
into the Germanic soul not only the New Testament but now the holy
book of the Jews (see William Pierce’s critique of Luther in The Fair
Race).

88
Anyone who disputed his right to this title was guilty of capital
treason…

The shelter that the city could offer refugees was like
streams of water to a panting deer. Charity lay at the heart of [John]
Calvin’s vision. Even a Jew, if he needed assistance, might be given
it. ‘Remember this: Whoever sows sparingly will also reap sparingly,
and whoever sows generously will also reap generously.’ The
readiness of Geneva to offer succour to refugees was, for Calvin, a
critical measure of his success. He never doubted that many
Genevans profoundly resented the influx of impecunious foreigners
into their city. But nor did he ever question his responsibility to
educate them anew. The achievement of Geneva in hosting vast
numbers of refugees was to prove a momentous one.34 [pages 324-
332]

34 Editor’s note: Just as Catholics admitted baptised Jews into

their kingdoms after the expulsion of the unconverted, the Protestant
counterpart made the same mistake: all based on Christian piety (‘Even
a Jew, if he needed assistance, might be given it.’). The subsequent
history of Europe speaks for itself: it wasn’t the Jews who empowered
themselves but pious Christians and, later, the French Jacobins.

89
Twenty-first entry
On 9 November 1620, one day after the battle of the White
Mountain, a ship named the Mayflower arrived off a thin spit of land
in the northern reaches of the New World. Crammed into its holds
were a hundred passengers who, in the words of one of them, had
made the gruelling two-month voyage across the Atlantic because
‘they knew they were pilgrims’—and of these ‘pilgrims’, half had set
out from Leiden. These voyagers, though, were not Dutch, but
English. Leiden had been only a waypoint on a longer journey: one
that had begun in an England that had come to seem to the pilgrims
pestiferous with sin. First, in 1607, they had left their native land;
then, sailing for the New World thirteen years later, they had turned
their backs on Leiden as well. Not even the godly republic of the
Dutch had been able to satisfy their yearning for purity, for a sense
of harmony with the divine. The Pilgrims did not doubt the scale of
the challenge they faced. They perfectly appreciated that the new
England which it was their ambition to found would, if they were
not on their mettle, succumb no less readily to sin than the old. Yet
it offered them a breathing space: a chance to consecrate
themselves as a new Israel on virgin soil…

John Winthrop

Too much was at stake. It being the responsibility of elected

magistrates to guide a colony along its path to godliness, only those
who were visibly sanctified could possibly be allowed a vote. ‘The
covenant between you and us,’ Winthrop told his electorate, ‘is the

90
oath you have taken of us, which is to this purpose, that we shall
govern you and judge your causes by the rules of God’s laws and
our own, according to our best skill.’ The charge was a formidable
one: to chastise and encourage God’s people much as the prophets
of ancient Israel had done, in the absolute assurance that their
understanding of scripture was correct. No effort was spared in
staying true to this mission. Sometimes it might be expressed in the
most literal manner possible. In 1638, when settlers founded a
colony at New Haven, they modelled it directly on the plan of an
encampment that God had provided to Moses. [pages 340-343]

Twenty-second entry
The fall of Mexico to Christian arms had been followed by
the subjugation of other fantastical lands: of Peru, of Brazil, and of
islands named—in honour of Philip II—the Philippines. That God
had ordained these conquests, and that Christians had not merely a
right but a duty to prosecute them, remained, for many, a devout
conviction. Idolatry, human sacrifice and all the other foul
excrescences of paganism were still widely cited as justifications for
Spain’s globe-spanning empire. The venerable doctrine of
Aristotle—that it was to the benefit of barbarians to be ruled by
‘civilised and virtuous princes’—continued to be affirmed by
theologians in Christian robes.

There was, though, an alternative way of interpreting

Aristotle. In 1550, in a debate held in the Spanish city of Valladolid
on whether or not the Indians were entitled to self-government, the
aged Bartolomé de Las Casas had more than held his own. Who
were the true barbarians, he had demanded: the Indians, a people
‘gentle, patient and humble’, or the Spanish conquerors, whose lust
for gold and silver was no less ravening than their cruelty? Pagan or

91
not, every human being had been made equally by God and
endowed by him with the same spark of reason. To argue, as Las
Casas’ opponent had done, that the Indians were as inferior to the
Spaniards as monkeys were to men was a blasphemy, plain and
simple.
‘All the peoples of the world are humans, and there is only
one definition of all humans and of each one, that is that they are
rational.’ Every mortal—Christian or not—had rights that derived
from God. Derechos humanos, Las Casas had termed them: ‘human
rights’. It was difficult for any Christians who accepted such a
concept to believe themselves superior to pagans simply by virtue
of being Christian. The vastness of the world, not to mention the
seemingly infinite nature of the peoples who inhabited it, served
missionaries both as an incentive and as an admonition.35 [pages
346-347]

35 Editor’s note: Bartolomé de Las Casas was my father’s idol

in the last decades of his life, to the extent that he composed La Santa
Furia, a symphonic work accompanied by more than a hundred voices
and a theatrical performance, which premiered in Mexico City’s Palacio
de Bellas Artes on 23 February 2018. In El Grial I wrote a harsh
review of my father’s last symphonic work, who died before the
premiere. Among his descendants, because of La Santa Furia some
believe in the myth of Las Casas: one of the founders of the Black
Legend. (Manuel Fernández Álvarez, a Spanish historian considered an
authority in 15th and 16th century Spain, has defined the ‘Black
Legend’ as a distortion of the history of a people to morally disqualify
them, whose supremacy must be fought by all means. Based on this
definition, I would add it is not uncommon in Mexico to adopt the
Black Legend even on the part of self-flagellating white Mexicans of
Spanish descent.)

92
 Twenty-third entry: Modernitas
In England, where the self-identification of Puritans as the
new Israel had fostered a boom in the study of Hebrew, this might
on occasion shade almost into admiration. Even before Menasseh’s
arrival in London…
The rabbi Menasseh ben Israel travelled from Amsterdam
to London to beg that Jews be granted a legal right of residency in
England… There were sectarians who claimed it a sin ‘that the Jews
were not allowed the open profession and exercise of their religion
amongst us’. Some warned that God’s anger was bound to fall on
England unless repentance was shown for their expulsion. Others
demanded their readmission so that they might the more easily be
won for Christ, and thereby expedite the end of days. Cromwell,
who convened an entire conference in Whitehall to debate
Menasseh’s request, was sympathetic to this perspective.
Nevertheless, he failed to win formal backing for it. Accordingly—
in typical fashion—he opted for compromise. Written permission
for the Jews to settle in England was denied; but Cromwell did give
Menasseh the private nod, and a pension of a hundred pounds…
The refusal of Cromwell to grant them a formal right of
admission prompted missionaries to head for Amsterdam. The early
signs were not promising. The Jews there seemed resolutely
uninterested in the Quakers’ message; the authorities were hostile;
only one of the missionaries spoke Dutch. Nevertheless, it was not
the Quaker way to despair. There was, so one of the missionaries
reported, ‘a spark in many of the Jews’ bosoms, which in process of
time may kindle to a burning flame’… A second pamphlet, A Loving
Salutation to the Seed of Abraham Among the Jews, quickly followed.
Anxious to get both tracts into Hebrew, the Quaker missionaries in
Amsterdam were delighted to report back to Fell that they had
successfully procured the services of a translator. This translator

93
was not only a skilled linguist; he had also been a pupil of none
other than Menasseh himself.36 [pages 372-374]

Twenty-fourth entry
To be a Christian was to be a pilgrim. This conviction,
widely shared by Protestants, did not imply any nostalgia for the
dark days of popery, when monks had gulled the faithful into
trekking vast distances to bow and scrape before bogus relics.
Rather, it meant to journey through life in the hope that at its end
the pilgrim would be met by shining angels, and dressed in raiment
that shone like gold, and led into heaven, a city on a hill…
New World, though, was not New England. South of
Boston and Plymouth, there was no lack of places where dissenters
might settle without fear of harassment. The most visionary of all
was a colony named Philadelphia: ‘Brotherly Love’. William Penn,
its founder, was a man of paradox. The son of one of Cromwell’s
admirals, he was simultaneously a dandy with close links to the royal
court, and a Quaker who had repeatedly suffered imprisonment for
his beliefs. Philadelphia, the capital of a huge tranche of territory
granted Penn by royal charter, was designed to serve as ‘a holy
experiment’: a city without stockades, at peace with the local
Indians, in which all ‘such as profess faith in Jesus Christ’ might be
permitted to hold office. Just as the godly colonies of New England
had been founded to serve the whole world as models, so too was
Philadelphia—but as a haven of tolerance. By the early eighteenth
century, its streets were filled with Anabaptists as well as Quakers,
and with Germans as well as English. There were Jews…
In the autumn of 1718, when a Quaker named Benjamin
Lay sailed for the Caribbean with his wife, Sarah, he could do so
confident that they would literally be among [the Religious Society
of] Friends… One day, visiting a Quaker who lived some miles
outside Bridgetown, Sarah Lay was shocked to find a naked African
suspended outside his house. The man had just been savagely
whipped. Blood, dripping from his twitching body, had formed a

36 Editor’s note: This Jew was none other than Baruch

Spinoza. Protestant Christians were instrumental in reversing the
ban on Jews. Soon after, they returned to England. The rest is
history.

94
puddle in the dust. Flies were swarming over his wounds. Like the
more than seventy thousand other Africans on Barbados, the man
was a slave. The Quaker, explaining to Sarah that he was a runaway,
felt no need to apologise. As in the time of Gregory of Nyssa, so in
the time of the Lays: slavery was regarded by the overwhelming
majority of Christians as being—much like poverty, or war, or
sickness—a brutal fact of life. That there was no slave nor free in
Christ Jesus did not mean that the distinction itself was abolished.
Europeans, who lived on a continent where the institution had
largely vanished, rarely thought for that reason to condemn it out of
hand.
Even Bartolomé de Las Casas, whose campaign to redeem
the Indians from slavery had become the focus of his entire life,
never doubted that servitude might be merited as punishment for
certain crimes. In the Caribbean as in Spanish America, the need for
workers who could be relied upon to toil in hot and sticky climates
without dying of the tropical diseases to which European labourers
were prone made the purchase of Africans seem an obvious
recourse. No Christian should feel guilt. Abraham had owned
slaves. Laws in the Pentateuch regulated their treatment. A letter
written by Paul’s followers, but attributed to Paul himself, urged
them to obey their owners. ‘Do it, not only when their eye is on you
and to win their favour, but with sincerity of heart and reverence
for the Lord.’ The punishment of a runaway, then, might well be
viewed as God’s work. Even Lay, despite not owning slaves
himself, had been known to reach for a whip when other people’s
slaves stole from him. ‘Sometimes I could catch them, and then I
would give them Stripes.’
Lay, when he remembered bringing down the lash on a
starving slave’s back, did not reach for scriptural justifications. On
the contrary, he felt only a crushing sense of self-abhorrence. His
guilt was that of a man who had suddenly discovered himself to be
in the city of Destruction. ‘Oh my Heart has been pained within me
many times, to see and hear; and now, now, now, it is so.’ Las
Casas, brought to a similar consciousness of his sin, had turned for
guidance to the great inheritance of Catholic scholarship: to
Cajetan, and Aquinas, and the compilers of canon law. Lay turned
for guidance to the Spirit. When he and his wife, fearlessly
confronting the slave-owners of Barbados, beseeched them to

95
‘examine your own Hearts’, it was with an inner certitude as to the
ultimate meaning of Scripture.

Benjamin Lay, the four-foot hunchback

who devoted his life to an ultimately
successful campaignto persuade his fellow
Quakers to condemn the slave trade.

The God that Lay could feel as enlightenment had bought

his Chosen People out of slavery in Egypt; his son had washed feet,
and suffered a death of humiliating agony, and redeemed all of
humanity from servitude. To trade in slaves, to separate them from
their children, to whip and rack and roast them, to starve them, to
work them to death, to care nothing for the mixing into raw sugar
of their ‘Limbs, Bowels and Excrements’, was not to be a Christian,
but to be worse than the Devil himself. The more that the Lays,
opening their home and their table to starving slaves, learned about
slavery, the more furiously they denounced it—and the more
unpopular they became. Forced to beat a retreat from Barbados in
1720, they were never to escape the shadow of its horrors. For the
rest of their lives, their campaign to abolish slavery—quixotic
though it seemed—was to be their pilgrims’ progress.
They were not the first abolitionists in the New World.
Back in the 1670s, an Irish Quaker named William Edmundson had
toured both Barbados and New England, campaigning to have
Christianity taught to African slaves. Then, on 19 September 1676,
writing to his fellow Friends in the Rhode Island settlement of
Newport, he had been struck by a sudden thought. ‘And many of

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you count it unlawful to make slaves of the Indians, and if so, then
why the Negroes?’
This again was to echo Las Casas. The great Spanish
campaigner for human rights, in his anxiety to spare Indians
enslavement, had for many decades backed the importation of
Africans to do forced labour. This he had done under the
impression that they were convicts, sold as punishment for their
crimes. Then, late in life, he had discovered the terrible truth: that
the Africans were unjustly enslaved, and no less the victims of
Christian oppression than the Indians. The guilt felt by Las Casas,
the revulsion and dread of damnation, had been sharpened by the
sustenance that he knew he had provided to the argument of
Aristotle: that certain races were suited to be slaves. ‘God has made
of one blood all nations.’ When William Penn, writing in prison,
cited this line of scripture, he had been making precisely the same
case as Las Casas: that all of humanity had been created equally in
God’s image; that to argue for a hierarchy of races was an offence
against the very fundamentals of Christ’s teaching; that no peoples
were fitted by the colour of their skins to serve as either masters or
slaves. Naturally—since this was an argument that so self-evidently
went with the grain of Christian tradition—it was capable of
provoking some anxiety among the owners of African slaves. Just as
opponents of the Dominican had cited Aristotle, so opponents of
Quaker abolitionists might grope after obscure verses in the Old
Testament.
Yet Lay’s campaign, for all that it drew on the example of
the prophets, and for all that his admonitions against slavery were
garlanded with biblical references, did indeed constitute something
different. To target it for abolition was to endow society itself with
the character of a pilgrim, bound upon a continuous journey, away
from sinfulness towards the light… It was founded upon the
conviction that had for centuries, in the lands of the Christian West,
served as the great incubator of revolution: that society might be
born again. ‘Flesh gives birth to flesh, but the Spirit gives birth to
spirit.’ Never once did Lay despair of these words of Jesus. Twenty
years after he had gate-crashed the annual assembly of Philadelphia
Friends, as he lay mortally sick in bed, he was brought news that a
new assembly had voted to discipline any Quaker who traded in
slaves. ‘I can now die in peace,’ he sighed in relief… Benjamin Lay
had succeeded, by the time of his death in 1759, in making the

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community in which he had lived just that little bit more like him—
in making it just that little bit more progressive. [pages 379-386]

Twenty-fifth entry 37

François-Marie Arouet (Voltaire)

‘He has his brethren from Beijing to Cayenne, and he

reckons all the wise his brothers.’
Yet this, of course, was merely to proclaim another sect—
and, what was more, one with some very familiar pretensions. The
dream of a universal religion was nothing if not catholic. Ever since
the time of Luther, attempts by Christians to repair the torn fabric
of Christendom had served only to shred it further. The charges
that Voltaire levelled against Christianity—that it was bigoted, that

37 Editor’s note: Why doesn’t my anti-Christian website pay

homage to Voltaire or the French philosophers, so anti-Christian they

were? The answer is devastatingly simple. They were all Neo-
Christians. They all broke with church dogma, true: but not with the
ethical code that underlies Christianity. ‘Secular Christianity,’ like that
of the French Enlightenment, is even more dangerous than traditional
Christianity since the atheist, the agnostic or the deist of other times
believes he has emancipated himself when in reality he is as much an
axiological slave to the religion of our ancestors as the most fanatic
Calvinist. After a few pages in which Holland writes about the horrible
torture and death inflicted on an innocent Frenchman for religious
reasons, and how Voltaire reacted with pamphlets to this outrage
perpetrated by Catholics, he quoted the most famous French
philosopher.

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it was superstitious, that its scriptures were rife with
contradictions—were none of them original to him. All had been
honed, over the course of two centuries and more, by pious
Christians. Voltaire’s God, like the Quakers’, like the Collegiants’,
like Spinoza’s, was a deity whose contempt for sectarian wrangling
owed everything to sectarian wrangling. ‘Superstition is to religion
what astrology is to astronomy, that is the very foolish daughter of a
wise and intelligent mother.’ Voltaire’s dream of a brotherhood of
man, even as it cast Christianity as something fractious, parochial,
murderous, could not help but betray its Christian roots. Just as
Paul had proclaimed that there was neither Jew nor Greek in Christ
Jesus, so—in a future blessed with full enlightenment—was there
destined to be neither Jew nor Christian nor Muslim. Their every
difference would be dissolved. Humanity would be as one.
‘You are all sons of God.’ Paul’s epochal conviction that the
world stood on the brink of a new dispensation, that the knowledge
of it would be written on people’s hearts, that old identities and
divisions would melt and vanish away, had not released its hold on
the philosophes. Even those who pushed their quest for ‘the light of
reason’ to overtly blasphemous extremes could not help but remain
its heirs.
In 1719—three years before the young Voltaire’s arrival in
the Dutch Republic, on his ever first trip abroad—a book had been
printed there so monstrous that its ‘mere title evoked fear’. The
Treatise of the Three Imposters, although darkly rumoured to have had a
clandestine existence since the age of Conrad of Marburg, had in
reality been compiled by a coterie of Huguenots in The Hague. As
indicated by its alternative title—The Spirit of Spinoza—it was a book
very much of its time. Nevertheless, its solution to the rival
understandings of religion that had led to the Huguenots’ exile from
France was one to put even the Theological-Political Treatise in the
shade. Christ, far from being ‘the voice of God’, as Spinoza had
argued, had been a charlatan: a sly seller of false dreams. His
disciples had been imbeciles, his miracles trickery. There was no
need for Christians to argue over scripture. The Bible was nothing
but a spider’s web of lies. Yet the authors of the Treatise, although
they certainly aspired to heal the divisions between Protestants and
Catholics by demonstrating that Christianity itself was nothing but a
fraud, did not rest content with that ambition. They remained
sufficiently Christian that they wished to bring light to the entire

99
world. Jews and Muslims too were dupes. Jesus ranked alongside
Moses and Muhammad as one of three imposters. All religion was a
hoax. Even Voltaire was shocked. No less committed than any
priest to the truth of his own understanding of God, he viewed the
blasphemies of the Treatise as blatant atheism, and quite as
pernicious as superstition. Briefly taking a break from mocking
Christians for their sectarian rivalries, he wrote a poem warning his
readers not to trust the model of enlightenment being peddled by
underground radicals. The Treatise itself was an imposture. Some
sense of the divine was needed, or else society would fall apart. ‘If
God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him’…
The standards by which he judged Christianity, and
condemned it for its faults, were not universal. They were not
shared by philosophers across the world. They were not common
from Beijing to Cayenne. They were distinctively, peculiarly
Christian… Atheist though he was, Diderot was too honest not to
acknowledge the likeliest answer. ‘If there were a Christ, I assure
you that Voltaire would be saved.’
The roots of Christianity stretched too deep, too thick,
coiled too implacably around the foundations of everything that
constituted the fabric of France, gripped too tightly its venerable
and massive stonework, to be pulled up with any ease. In a realm
long hailed as the eldest daughter of the Church, the ambition of
setting the world on a new order, of purging it of superstition, of
redeeming it from tyranny, could hardly help but be shot through
with Christian assumptions. The dreams of the philosophes were
both novel and not novel in the slightest. [pages 392-395]

Twenty-sixth entry 38
It took effort to strip bare a basilica as vast as the one that
housed Saint Martin. For a millennium and more after the great
victory won by Charles Martel over the Saracens, it had continued

38 Editor’s note: So far, I have only quoted a few paragraphs

from each chapter of Holland’s book. But the ‘Woe to You Who Are
Rich’ section of the ‘Enlightenment’ chapter is so important that I will
quote it in full. That section shows no more and no less how
Christianity metamorphosed into Neo-Christianity: the mental virus
that has been infecting the white man since the American Revolution
and the French Revolution.

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to thrive as a centre of pilgrimage. A succession of disasters—
attacks by Vikings, fires—had repeatedly seen it rebuilt. So
sprawling had the complex of buildings around the basilica grown
that it had come to be known as Martinopolis. But revolutionaries,
by their nature, relished a challenge. In the autumn of 1793, when
bands of them armed with sledgehammers and pickaxes occupied
the basilica, they set to work with gusto. There were statues of
saints to topple, vestments to burn, tombs to smash. Lead had to be
stripped from the roof, and bells removed from towers. ‘A
sanctuary can do without a grille, but the defence of the Fatherland
cannot do without pikes.’ So efficiently was Martinopolis stripped
of its treasures that within only a few weeks it was bare. Even so—
the state of crisis being what it was—the gaunt shell of the basilica
could not be permitted to go to waste. West of Tours, in the
Vendée, the Revolution was in peril. Bands of traitors, massed
behind images of the Virgin, had risen in revolt. Patriots recruited
to the cavalry, when they arrived in Tours, needed somewhere to
keep their horses. The solution was obvious. The basilica of Saint
Martin was converted into a stable.
Horse shit steaming in what had once been one of the
holiest shrines in Christendom gave to Voltaire’s contempt
for l’infâme a far more pungent expression than anything that might
have been read in a salon. The ambition of France’s new rulers was
to mould an entire ‘people of philosophes’. The old order had been
weighed and found wanting. The monarchy itself had been
abolished. The erstwhile king of France—who at his coronation
had been anointed with oil brought from heaven for the baptism of
Clovis, and girded with the sword of Charlemagne—had been
executed as a common criminal. His decapitation, staged before a
cheering crowd, had come courtesy of the guillotine, a machine of
death specifically designed by its inventor to be as enlightened as it
was egalitarian. Just as the king’s corpse, buried in a rough wooden
coffin, had then been covered in quicklime, so had every division of
rank in the country, every marker of aristocracy, been dissolved into
a common citizenship. It was not enough, though, merely to set
society on new foundations. The shadow of superstition reached
everywhere. Time itself had to be recalibrated. That October, a new
calendar was introduced. Sundays were swept away. So too was the
practice of dating years from the incarnation of Christ.

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Henceforward, in France, it was the proclamation of the Republic
that would serve to divide the sweep of time.
Even with this innovation in place, there still remained
much to be done. For fifteen centuries, priests had been leaving
their grubby fingerprints on the way that the past was
comprehended. All that time, they had been carrying ‘pride and
barbarism in their feudal souls’. And before that? A grim warning of
what might happen should the Revolution fail was to be found in
the history of Greece and Rome. The radiance that lately had begun
to dawn over Europe was not the continent’s first experience of
enlightenment. The battle between reason and unreason, between
civilisation and barbarism, between philosophy and religion, was
one that had been fought in ancient times as well. ‘In the pagan
world, a spirit of toleration and gentleness had ruled.’ It was this
that the sinister triumph of Christianity had blotted out. Fanaticism
had prevailed. Now, though, all the dreams of the philosophes were
coming true. L’infâme was being crushed. For the first time since the
age of Constantine, Christianity was being targeted by a
government for eradication. Its baleful reign, banished on the blaze
of revolution, stood revealed as a nightmare that for too long had
been permitted to separate twin ages of progress: a middle age.
This was an understanding of the past that, precisely
because so flattering to sensibilities across Europe, was destined to
prove infinitely more enduring than the makeshift calendar of the
Revolution. Nevertheless, just like many other hallmarks of the
Enlightenment, it did not derive from the philosophes. The
understanding of Europe’s history as a succession of three distinct
ages had originally been popularised by the Reformation. To
Protestants, it was Luther who had banished shadow from the
world, and the early centuries of the Church, prior to its corruption
by popery, that had constituted the primal age of light. By 1753,
when the term ‘Middle Ages’ first appeared in English, Protestants
had come to take for granted the existence of a distinct period of
history: one that ran from the dying years of the Roman Empire to
the Reformation. The revolutionaries, when they tore down the
monastic buildings of Saint-Denis, when they expelled the monks
from Cluny and left its buildings to collapse, when they
reconsecrated Notre Dame as a ‘Temple of Reason’ and installed
beneath its vaulting a singer dressed as Liberty, were paying
unwitting tribute to an earlier period of upheaval. In Tours as well,

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the desecration visited on the basilica was not the first such
vandalism that it had suffered. Back in 1562, when armed conflict
between Catholics and Protestants had erupted across France, a
band of Huguenots had torched the shrine of Saint Martin and
tossed the relics of the saint onto the fire. Only a single bone and a
fragment of his skull had survived. It was hardly unsurprising, then,
in the first throes of the Revolution, that many Catholics, in their
bewilderment and disorientation, should initially have suspected
that it was all a Protestant plot.
In truth, though, the origins of the great earthquake that
had seen the heir of Clovis consigned to a pauper’s grave extended
much further back than the Reformation. ‘Woe to you who are
rich.’ Christ’s words might almost have been the manifesto of those
who could afford only ragged trousers, and so were categorised as
men ‘without knee-breeches’: sans-culottes. They were certainly not
the first to call for the poor to inherit the earth. So too had the
radicals among the Pelagians, who had dreamed of a world in
which every man and woman would be equal; so too had the
Taborites, who had built a town on communist principles, and
mockingly crowned the corpse of a king with straw; so too had the
Diggers, who had denounced property as an offence against God.
Nor, in the ancient city of Tours, were the sans-culottes who
ransacked the city’s basilica the first to be outraged by the wealth of
the Church, and by the palaces of its bishops. In Marmoutier, where
Alcuin had once promoted scripture as the inheritance of all the
Christian people, a monk in the twelfth century had drawn up a
lineage for Martin that cast him as the heir of kings and emperors—
and yet Martin had been no aristocrat. The silken landowners of
Gaul, offended by the roughness of his manners and his dress, had
detested him much as their heirs detested the militants of
revolutionary France. Like the radicals who had stripped bare his
shrine, Martin had been a destroyer of idols, a scorner of privilege, a
scourge of the mighty. Even amid all the splendours of
Martinopolis, the most common depiction of the saint had shown
him sharing his cloak with a beggar. Martin had been a sans-culotte.
There were many Catholics, in the first flush of the
Revolution, who had recognised this. Just as English radicals, in the
wake of Charles I’s defeat, had hailed Christ as the first Leveller, so
were there enthusiasts for the Revolution who saluted him as ‘the
first sans-culotte’. Was not the liberty proclaimed by the Revolution
the same as that proclaimed by Paul? ‘You, my brothers, were called

103
to be free.’ This, in August 1789, had been the text at the funeral
service for the men who, a month earlier, had perished while
storming the Bastille, the great fortress in Paris that had provided
the French monarchy with its most intimidating prison. Even the
Jacobins, the Revolution’s dominant and most radical faction, had
initially been welcoming to the clergy. For a while, indeed, priests
were more disproportionately represented in their ranks than any
other profession. As late as November 1791, the president elected
by the Paris Jacobins had been a bishop. It seemed fitting, then, that
their name should have derived from the Dominicans, whose
former headquarters they had made their base. Certainly, to begin
with, there had been little evidence to suggest that a revolution
might precipitate an assault on religion.
And much from across the Atlantic to suggest the opposite.
There, thirteen years before the storming of the Bastille, Britain’s
colonies in North America had declared their independence. A
British attempt to crush the revolution had failed. In France—
where the monarchy’s financial backing of the rebels had ultimately
contributed to its own collapse—the debt of the American
revolution to the ideals of the philosophes appeared clear. There were
many in the upper echelons of the infant republic who agreed. In
1783, six years before becoming their first president, the general
who had led the colonists to independence hailed the United States
of America as a monument to enlightenment. ‘The foundation of
our Empire,’ George Washington had declared, ‘was not laid in the
gloomy age of Ignorance and Superstition, but at an Epoch when
the rights of mankind were better understood and more clearly
defined than at any former period.’ This vaunt, however, had
implied no contempt for Christianity. Quite the opposite. Far more
than anything written by Spinoza or Voltaire, it was New England
that had provided the American republic with its model of
democracy, and Pennsylvania with its model of toleration. That all
men had been created equal, and endowed with an inalienable right
to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, were not remotely self-
evident truths. That most Americans believed they were owed less
to philosophy than to the Bible: to the assurance given equally to
Christians and Jews, to Protestants and Catholics, to Calvinists and
Quakers, that every human being was created in God’s image. The
truest and ultimate seedbed of the American republic—no matter

104
what some of those who had composed its founding documents
might have cared to think—was the book of Genesis.
The genius of the authors of the United States constitution
was to garb in the robes of the Enlightenment the radical
Protestantism that was the prime religious inheritance of their
fledgling nation. When, in 1791, an amendment was adopted which
forbade the government from preferring one Church over another,
this was no more a repudiation of Christianity than Cromwell’s
enthusiasm for religious liberty had been. Hostility to imposing tests
on Americans as a means of measuring their orthodoxy owed far
more to the meeting houses of Philadelphia than to the salons of
Paris. ‘If Christian Preachers had continued to teach as Christ & his
Apostles did, without Salaries, and as the Quakers now do, I
imagine Tests would never have existed.’ So wrote the polymath
who, as renowned for his invention of the lightning rod as he was
for his tireless role in the campaign for his country’s independence,
had come to be hailed as the ‘first American’.

Benjamin Franklin served as a living harmonisation of New

England and Pennsylvania. Born in Boston, he had run away as a
young man to Philadelphia; a lifelong admirer of Puritan
egalitarianism, he had published Benjamin Lay; a strong believer in
divine providence, he had been shamed by the example of the
Quakers into freeing his slaves. If, like the philosophes who much
admired him as an embodiment of rugged colonial virtue, he
dismissed as idle dogma anything that smacked of superstition, and
doubted the divinity of Christ, then he was no less the heir of his
country’s Protestant traditions for that. Voltaire, meeting him in
Paris, and asked to bless his grandson, had pronounced in English
what he declared to be the only appropriate benediction: ‘God and

105
liberty.’ Franklin, like the revolution for which he was such an
effective spokesman, illustrated a truth pregnant with implications
for the future: that the surest way to promote Christian teachings as
universal was to portray them as deriving from anything other than
Christianity.
In France, this was a lesson with many students. There, too,
they spoke of rights. The founding document of the country’s
revolution, the sonorously titled ‘Declaration of the Rights of Man
and of the Citizen’, had been issued barely a month after the fall of
the Bastille. Part-written as it was by the American ambassador to
France, it drew heavily on the example of the United States. The
histories of the two countries, though, were very different. France
was not a Protestant nation. There existed in the country a rival
claimant to the language of human rights. These, so it was claimed
by revolutionaries on both sides of the Atlantic, existed naturally
within the fabric of things, and had always done so, transcending
time and space. Yet this, of course, was quite as fantastical a belief
as anything to be found in the Bible. The evolution of the concept
of human rights, mediated as it had been since the Reformation by
Protestant jurists and philosophes, had come to obscure its original
authors. It derived, not from ancient Greece or Rome, but from the
period of history condemned by all right-thinking revolutionaries as
a lost millennium, in which any hint of enlightenment had at once
been snuffed out by monkish, book-burning fanatics. It was an
inheritance from the canon lawyers of the Middle Ages.
Nor had the Catholic Church—much diminished though it
might be from its heyday—abandoned its claim to a universal
sovereignty. This, to revolutionaries who insisted that ‘the principle
of any sovereignty resides essentially in the Nation’, could hardly
help but render it a roadblock. No source of legitimacy could
possibly be permitted that distracted from that of the state.
Accordingly, in 1791—even as legislators in the United States were
agreeing that there should be ‘no law respecting an establishment of
religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof’—the Church in
France had been nationalised. The legacy of Gregory VII appeared
decisively revoked. Only the obduracy of Catholics who refused to
pledge their loyalty to the new order had necessitated the escalation
of measures against Christianity itself. Even those among the
revolutionary leadership who questioned the wisdom of attempting
to eradicate religion from France never doubted that the

106
pretensions of the Catholic Church were insupportable. By 1793,
priests were no longer welcome in the Jacobins. That anything of
value might have sprung from the mulch of medieval superstition
was a possibility too grotesque even to contemplate. Human rights
owed nothing to the flux of Christian history. They were eternal and
universal—and the Revolution was their guardian. ‘The Declaration
of Rights is the Constitution of all peoples, all other laws being
variable by nature, and subordinated to this one.’

The Declaration of the Rights of Man

portrayed as though delivered on
tablets of stone from Mount Sinai.
So declared Maximilien Robespierre, most formidable and
implacable of the Jacobin leaders. Few men were more icily
contemptuous of the claims on the future of the past. Long an
opponent of the death penalty, he had worked fervently for the
execution of the king; shocked by the vandalising of churches, he
believed that virtue without terror was impotent. There could be no
mercy shown the enemies of the Revolution. They bore the taint of
leprosy. Only once they had been amputated, and their evil excised
from the state, would the triumph of the people be assured. Only
then would France be fully born again. Yet there hung over this a
familiar irony. The ambition of eliminating hereditary crimes and
absurdities, of purifying humanity, of bringing them from vice to
virtue, was redolent not just of Luther, but of Gregory VII. The

107
vision of a universal sovereignty, one founded amid the humbling
of kings and the marshalling of lawyers, stood recognisably in a line
of descent from that of Europe’s primal revolutionaries. So too
their efforts to patrol dissidence. Voltaire, in his attempt to win a
pardon for Calas, had compared the legal system in Toulouse to the
crusade against the Albigensians. Three decades on, the mandate
given to troops marching on the Vendée, issued by self-professed
admirers of Voltaire, echoed the crusaders with a far more brutal
precision. ‘Kill them all. God knows his own.’ Such was the order
that the papal legate was reputed to have given before the walls of
Béziers. ‘Spear with your bayonets all the inhabitants you encounter
along the way. I know there may be a few patriots in this region—it
matters not, we must sacrifice all.’ So the general sent to pacify the
Vendée in early 1794 instructed his troops. One-third of the
population would end up dead: as many as a quarter of a million
civilians.
Meanwhile, back in the capital, the execution of those
condemned as enemies of the people was painted by enthusiasts for
revolutionary terror in recognisably scriptural colours. Good and
evil locked in a climactic battle, the entire world at stake; the
damned compelled to drink the wine of wrath; a new age replacing
the old: here were the familiar contours of apocalypse. When,
demonstrating that its justice might reach even into the grave, the
revolutionary government ordered the exhumation of the royal
necropolis at Saint-Denis, the dumping of royal corpses into lime
pits was dubbed by those who had commissioned it the Last
Judgement.
The Jacobins, though, were not Dominicans. It was
precisely the Christian conviction that ultimate judgement was the
prerogative of God, and that life for every sinner was a journey
towards either heaven or hell, that was the object of their
enlightened scorn. Even Robespierre, who believed in the eternity
of the soul, did not on that count imagine that justice should be left
to the chill and distant deity that he termed the Supreme Being. It
was the responsibility of all who cherished virtue to work for its
triumph in the here and now. The Republic had to be made pure.
To imagine that a deity might ever perform this duty was the
rankest superstition. In the Gospels, it was foretold that those who
had oppressed the poor would only receive their due at the end of
days, when Christ would return in glory, and separate ‘the people

108
one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats’.
But this would never happen. A people of philosophes could
recognise it to be a fairy tale. So it was that the charge of sorting the
goats from the sheep, and of delivering them to punishment, had
been shouldered—selflessly, grimly, implacably—by the Jacobins.
This was why, in the Vendée, there was no attempt to do as
the friars had done in the wake of the Albigensian crusade and
apply to a diseased region a scalpel rather than a sword. It was why
as well, in Paris, the guillotine seemed never to take a break from its
work. As the spring of 1794 turned to summer, so its blade came to
hiss ever more relentlessly, and the puddles of blood to spill ever
more widely across the cobblestones. It was not individuals who
stood condemned, but entire classes. Aristocrats, moderates,
counter-revolutionaries of every stripe: all were enemies of the
people.
To show them mercy was a crime. Indulgence was an
atrocity; clemency parricide. Even when Robespierre, succumbing
to the same kind of factional battle in which he had so often
triumphed, was himself sent to the guillotine, his conviction that
‘the French Revolution is the first that will have been founded on
the rights of humanity’ did not fade. There needed no celestial
court, no deity sat on his throne, to deliver justice. ‘Depart from
me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil
and his angels.’ So Christ, at the day of judgement, was destined to
tell those who had failed to feed the hungry, to clothe the naked, to
visit the sick in prison. There was no requirement, in an age of
enlightenment, to take such nonsense seriously. The only heaven
was the heaven fashioned by revolutionaries on earth. Human rights
needed no God to define them. Virtue was its own reward. [pages
395-405]

Twenty-seventh entry
‘The darkness of the middle ages exhibits some scenes not
unworthy of our notice.’ Condescension of this order, an amused
acknowledgement that even amid the murk of the medieval past the
odd flickering of light might on occasion be observed, was not
unknown among the philosophes. To committed revolutionaries,
however, compromise with barbarism was out of the question. The
Middle Ages had been a breeding ground of superstition, and that
was that. Unsurprisingly, then, there was much enthusiasm among

109
Jacobins for the customs and manners that had existed prior to the
triumph of Christianity.

The role played by the early Church in the imaginings of the

Reformation was played in the imaginings of the French Revolution
by classical Greece and Rome. Festivals designed to celebrate the
dawning of the new age drew their inspiration from antique temples
and statuary; the names of saints vanished from streets in Paris, to
be replaced by those of Athenian philosophers; revolutionary
leaders modelled themselves obsessively on Cicero. Even when the
French Republic, mimicking the sombre course of Roman history,
succumbed to military dictatorship, the new regime continued to
plunder the dressing-up box of classical antiquity. Its armies
followed eagles to victories across Europe. Its victories were
commemorated in Paris on a colossal triumphal arch. Its leader, a
general of luminescent genius named Napoleon, affected the laurel
wreath of a Caesar. The Church meanwhile—grudgingly tolerated
by an emperor who had invited the pope to his coronation, but
then refused to be crowned by him—functioned effectively as a
department of state. Salt was rubbed into the wound when a saint
named Napoleon was manufactured in honour of the emperor, and
given his own public fête. Augustus would no doubt have
approved.
Nevertheless, the notion that antiquity offered the present
nothing save for models of virtue, nothing save for exemplars
appropriate to an enlightened and progressive age, had limitations.
In 1797, a book was published in Paris that provided a very

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different perspective. Emphasis on the ‘toleration and gentleness’ of
the ancients there was not… Over many hundreds of pages, the
claim that empires in the remote past had regarded as perfectly
legitimate customs that under the influence of Christianity had
come to be regarded as crimes was rehearsed in painstaking detail.
‘The doctrine of loving one’s neighbour is a fantasy that we
owe to Christianity and not to Nature.’ Yet even once Sade, set free
by the Revolution, had found himself living under ‘the reign of
philosophy’, in a republic committed to casting off the clammy hold
of superstition, he had found that the pusillanimous doctrines of
Jesus retained their grip. Specious talk of brotherhood was as
common in revolutionary committee rooms as it had been in
churches. In 1793—following his improbable election as president
of a local committee in Paris—Sade had issued instructions to his
fellow citizens that they should all paint slogans on their houses:
‘Unity, Indivisibility of the Republic, Liberty, Equality, Fraternity’.
Sade himself, though, was no more a Jacobin than he was a
priest. The true division in society lay not between friends and
enemies of the people, but between those who were naturally
masters and those who were naturally slaves. Only when this was
appreciated and acted upon would the taint of Christianity finally be
eradicated, and humanity live as Nature prescribed. The inferior
class of man, so a philosophe in The New Justine coolly observed, ‘is
simply the species that stands next above the chimpanzee on the
ladder; and the distance separating them is, if anything, less than
that between him and the individual belonging to the superior
caste.’
Yet if this was the kind of talk that would see Sade spend
his final years consigned to a lunatic asylum, the icy pitilessness of
his gaze was not insanity. More clearly than many enthusiasts for
enlightenment cared to recognise, he could see that the existence of
human rights was no more provable than the existence of God. In
1794, prompted by rebellion in Saint-Domingue, a French-ruled
island in the West Indies, and by the necessary logic of the
Declaration of Rights, the revolutionary government had
proclaimed slavery abolished throughout France’s colonies; eight
years later, in a desperate and ultimately futile attempt to prevent
the blacks of Saint-Domingue from establishing their own republic,
Napoleon reinstated it… Yet even amid the concert of the great
powers there was evidence that it lived on as an ideal. That June, on

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his return from preparatory negotiations in Paris, the British
Foreign Secretary had been greeted by his fellow parliamentarians
with a standing ovation. Among the terms of the treaty agreed by
Lord Castlereagh had been one particularly startling stipulation: that
Britain and France would join in a campaign to abolish the slave
trade. This, to Benjamin Lay, would have been fantastical, an
impossible dream…
Both in the United States and in Britain, dread that slavery
ranked as a monstrous sin, for which not just individuals but entire
nations were certain to be chastised by God, had come to grip vast
swathes of the population. ‘Can it be expected that He will suffer
this great iniquity to go unpunished?’ Such a question would, of
course, have bewildered earlier generations of Christians. The
passages in the Bible that appeared to sanction slavery remained.
Plantation owners—both in the West Indies and in the southern
United States—did not hesitate to quote them. But this had failed
to stem the rising swell of protest. Indeed, it had left slave owners
open to a new and discomfiting charge: that they were the enemies
of progress. Already, by the time of the American Revolution, to be
a Quaker was to be an abolitionist. The gifts of the Spirit, though,
were not confined to Friends. They had come to be liberally
dispensed wherever English-speaking Protestants were gathered.
Large numbers of them, ranging from Baptists to Anglicans, had
been graced with good news: euangelion. To be an Evangelical was to
understand that the law of God was the law not only of justice, but
of love. No one who had felt the chains of sin fall away could
possibly doubt ‘that slaverywas ever detestable in the sight of God’.
There was no time to lose. And so it was, in 1807, in the midst of a
deadly struggle for survival against Napoleon, that the British
parliament had passed the Act for the Abolition of the Slave Trade;
and so it was, in 1814, that Lord Castlereagh, faced across the
negotiating table by uncomprehending foreign princes, had found
himself obliged to negotiate for the eradication of a business that
other nations still took for granted. Amazing Grace indeed. To
Sade, of course, it all had been folly. There was no brotherhood of
man; there was no duty owed the weak by the strong. Evangelicals,
like Jacobins, were the dupes of their shared inheritance…
On 8 February 1815, eight powers in Europe signed up to a
momentous declaration. Slavery, it stated, was ‘repugnant to the
principles of humanity and universal morality’. The language of

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evangelical Protestantism was fused with that of the French
Revolution.

Marquis de Sade
Napoleon, slipping his place of exile three weeks after the
declaration had been signed, and looking to rally international
support for his return, had no hesitation in proclaiming his support
for the declaration. That June, in the great battle outside Brussels
that terminally ended his ambitions, both sides were agreed that
slavery, as an institution, was an abomination. The twin traditions
of Britain and France, of Benjamin Lay and Voltaire, of enthusiasts
for the Spirit and enthusiasts for reason, had joined in amity even
before the first cannon was fired at Waterloo. The irony was one
that neither Protestants nor atheists cared to dwell upon: that an
age of enlightenment and revolution had served to establish as
international law a principle that derived from the depths of the
Catholic past. Increasingly, it was in the language of human rights
that Europe would proclaim its values to the world. [pages 407-412]

Twenty-eighth entry
Friedrich Wilhelm had first travelled there in 1814. The
highlight of the young crown prince’s journey had been a visit to
Cologne. The city—unlike Berlin, an upstart capital far removed
from the traditional heartlands of Christendom—was an ancient
one. Its foundations reached back to the time of Augustus. Its
archbishop had been one of the seven electors. Its cathedral, begun
in 1248 and abandoned in 1473, had for centuries been left with a
crane on the massive stump of its southern tower. Friedrich
Wilhelm, visiting the half-completed building, had been enraptured.
He had pledged himself there and then to finishing it. Now, two
years after his accession to the Prussian throne, he was ready to
fulfil his vow. That summer, he ordered builders back to work. On
4 September he dedicated a new cornerstone. Then, in a

113
spontaneous and heartfelt address to the people of Cologne, he
saluted their city. The cathedral, he declared, would rise as a
monument to ‘the spirit of German unity’.
Startling evidence of this was to be found on the executive
committee set up to supervise the project. Simon Oppenheim, a
banker awarded a lifelong honorary membership of the board, was
fabulously wealthy, highly cultured—and a Jew. Even within living
memory his presence in Cologne would have been illegal. For
almost four hundred years, Jews had been banned from the devoutly
Catholic city. Only in 1798, following its occupation by the French,
and the abolition of its ancient privileges, had they been allowed to
settle there again. Oppenheim’s father had moved to Cologne in
1799, two years before its official absorption into the French
Republic. Since France’s revolutionary government, faithful to the
Declaration of Rights, had granted full citizenship to its Jews, the
Oppenheims had been able to enjoy a civic equality with their
Catholic neighbours. Not even a revision of this by Napoleon, who
in 1808 had brought in a law expressly designed to discriminate
against Jewish business interests, had dampened their sense of
identification with Cologne—nor their ability to run a highly
successful bank from the city. It helped as well that Prussia, by the
time it came to annex the Rhineland, had already decreed that its
Jewish subjects should rank as both ‘natives’ and ‘citizens’. That
Napoleon’s discriminatory legislation remained on the statute book,
and that the Prussian decree had continued to ban Jews from
entering state employment, did nothing to diminish Oppenheim’s
hopes for further progress. The cathedral was for him as a symbol
not of the Christian past, but of a future in which Jews might be full
and equal citizens of Germany. That was why he agreed to help
fund it. Friedrich Wilhelm, rewarding him with a house call,
certainly had no hesitation in saluting him as a patriot. A Jew, it
seemed, might indeed be a German.
Except that the king, by visiting Oppenheim, was making a
rather different point. To Friedrich Wilhelm, the status of Cologne
Cathedral as an icon of the venerable Christian past was not some
incidental detail, but utterly fundamental to his passion for seeing it
finished. Half-convinced that the French Revolution had been a
harbinger of the Apocalypse, he dreamed of restoring to monarchy
the sacral quality that it had enjoyed back in the heyday of the Holy
Roman Empire. That he himself was fat, balding and short-sighted

114
in the extreme did nothing to diminish his enthusiasm for posing as
a latter-day Charlemagne. ‘Fatty Flounder’, as he was nicknamed,
had even renovated a ruined medieval castle, and inaugurated it
with a torchlit procession in fancy dress. Unsurprisingly, then,
confronted by the challenge of integrating Jews into his plans for a
shimmeringly Christian Prussia, he had groped after a solution that
might as well have been conjured up from the Middle Ages. Only
Christians, Friedrich Wilhelm argued, could be classed as Prussian.
Jews should be organised into corporations. They would thereby be
able to maintain their distinctive identity in an otherwise Christian
realm. This was not at all what Oppenheim wished to hear. Shortly
before the king’s arrival in Cologne, he had gone so far as to write
an open protest. Others in the city rallied to the cause.
The regional government pushed for full emancipation.
‘The strained relationship between Christians and Jews,’ thundered
Cologne’s leading newspaper, ‘can be resolved only through
unconditional equalisation of status.’ The result was deadlock.
Friedrich Wilhelm—channelling the spirit of a mail-clad medieval
emperor—refused to back down. Prussia, he insisted, was Christian
through and through. Its monarchy, its laws, its values—all derived
from Christianity. That being so, there could be no place for Jews in
its administration. If they wished to become properly Prussian, then
they had a simple recourse: conversion. All a Jew had to do to be
considered for public office was to make ‘confession of Christianity
in public acts’. This was why Friedrich Wilhelm had been willing to
pay a social call on Oppenheim. What was a Jew prepared to fund a
cathedral, after all, if not one close to finding Christ?

Simon Oppenheim

115
 But the king had been deluding himself. Oppenheim had no
intention of finding Christ. Instead, he and his family continued
with their campaign. It was not long before Cologne, previously
renowned as a bastion of chauvinism, was serving as a trailblazer
for Jewish emancipation. In 1845, Napoleon’s discriminatory
legislation was definitively abolished. Time would see a sumptuous
domed synagogue, designed by the architect responsible for the
cathedral, and funded—inevitably—by the Oppenheims, rise up as
one of the great landmarks of the city. Well before its construction,
though, it was evident that Friedrich Wilhelm’s dreams of
resurrecting a medieval model of Christianity were doomed. In
1847, one particularly waspish theologian portrayed the king as a
modern-day Julian the Apostate, chasing after a world forever gone.
Then, as though to set the seal on this portrait, revolution returned
to Europe. History seemed to be repeating itself.
In February 1848, a French king was deposed. By March,
protests and uprisings were flaring across Germany. Slogans
familiar from the time of Robespierre could be heard on the streets
of Berlin. The Prussian queen briefly dreaded that only the
guillotine was lacking. Although, in the event, the insurrectionary
mood was pacified, and the tottering Prussian monarchy stabilised,
concessions offered by Friedrich Wilhelm would prove enduring.
His kingdom emerged from the great crisis of 1848 as—for the first
time—a state with a written constitution. The vast majority of its
male inhabitants were now entitled to vote for a parliament. Among
them, enrolled at last as equal citizens, were Prussia’s Jews.
Friedrich Wilhelm, appalled by the threat to the divine order that he
had always pledged himself to upheld, declared himself sick to the
stomach. ‘If I were not a Christian I would take my own life.’
Nevertheless, as the king might justifiably have pointed out,
it was not Judaism that had been emancipated, but only those who
practised it. Supporters of the Declaration of Rights had always
been explicit on that score. The shackles of superstition were forged
in synagogues no less than in churches. ‘We must grant everything
to Jews as individuals, but refuse to them everything as a nation!’
This was the slogan with which, late in 1789, proponents of Jewish
emancipation in France had sought to reassure their fellow
revolutionaries. ‘They must form neither a political body nor an
order in the state, they must be citizens individually.’ And so it had
come to pass. When the French Republic granted citizenship to

116
Jews, it had done so on the understanding that they abandon any
sense of themselves as a people set apart. No recognition or
protection had been offered to the Mosaic law. The identity of Jews
as a distinct community was tolerated only to the degree that it did
not interfere with ‘the common good’.
Here—garlanded with the high-flown rhetoric of the
Enlightenment though it might be—was a programme for civic
self-improvement that aimed at transforming the very essence of
Judaism. Heraclius, a millennium and more previously, had
attempted something very similar. The dream that Jewish
distinctiveness might be subsumed into an identity that the whole
world could share—one in which the laws given by God to mark
the Jews out from other peoples would cease to matter—reached all
the way back to Paul. Artists in the early years of the French
Revolution, commissioned to depict the Declaration of Rights, had
not hesitated to represent it as a new covenant, chiselled onto stone
tablets and delivered from a blaze of light. Jews could either sign up
to this radiant vision, or else be banished into storm-swept
darkness. If this seemed to some Jews a very familiar kind of
ultimatum, then that was because it was. That the Declaration of
Rights claimed an authority for itself more universal than that of
Christianity only emphasised the degree to which, in the scale of its
ambitions and the scope of its pretensions, it was profoundly
Christian. [pages 421-425]

Twenty-ninth entry
The duty of a Christian nation, so Rawlinson’s colleague
had advised him, was to work for the regeneration of less fortunate
lands: to play a ‘noble part’. This, of course, was to cast his own
country as the very model of civilisation, the standard by which all
others might be judged: a conceit that came so naturally to imperial
peoples that the Persians too, back in the time of Darius, had
revelled in it. Yet the British, despite the certitude felt by many of
them that their empire was a blessing bestowed on the world by
heaven, could not entirely share in the swagger of the Great King.
Pride in their dominion over palm and pine was accompanied by a
certain nervousness. The sacrifice demanded by their God was a
humble and a contrite heart. To rule foreign peoples—let alone to
plunder them of their wealth, or to settle their lands, or to hook
their cities on opium—was also, for a Christian people, never quite

117
to forget that their Saviour had lived as the slave, not the master, of
a mighty empire. It was an official of that empire who had
sentenced him to death; it was soldiers of that empire who had
nailed him to a cross. Rome’s dominion had long since passed away.
The reign of Christ had not… In 1833, when the ban on the slave
trade had been followed by the emancipation of slaves throughout
the British Empire, abolitionists had greeted their hour of victory in
rapturously biblical terms. It was the rainbow seen by Noah over
the floodwaters; it was the passage of the Israelites through the Red
Sea; it was the breaking of the Risen Christ from his tomb. Britain,
a country that for so long had been lost in the valley of the shadow
of death, had emerged at last into light. Now, in atonement for her
guilt, it was her responsibility to help all the world be born again.
Nonetheless, British abolitionists knew better than to
trumpet their sense of Protestant mission too loudly. Slavery was
widespread, after all, and one that had made many in Portugal,
Spain and France exceedingly rich. A campaign against the practice
could never hope to be truly international without the backing of
Catholic powers. No matter that it was Britain’s naval muscle that
enabled slave-ships to be searched and their crews to be put on
trial, the legal frameworks that licensed these procedures had to
appear resolutely neutral. British jurists, conquering the deep
suspicion of anything Spanish that was an inheritance from the age
of Elizabeth I, brought themselves to praise the ‘courage and noble
principle’ of Bartolomé Las Casas. The result was an entire
apparatus of law—complete with treaties and international courts—
that made a virtue out of merging both Protestant and Catholic
traditions. In 1842, when an American diplomat defined the slave
trade as a ‘crime against humanity’, the term was one calculated to
be acceptable to lawyers of all Christian denominations—and none.
Slavery, which only decades previously had been taken almost
universally for granted, was now redefined as evidence of savagery
and backwardness. To oppose it was to side with progress. To
support it was to stand condemned before the bar, not just of
Christianity, but of every religion…
The owning of slaves was licensed by the Qur’an, by the
example of Muhammad himself, and by the Sunna, that great
corpus of Islamic traditions and practices. Who, then, were
Christians to demand its abolition? But the British, to the growing
bafflement of Muslim rulers, refused to leave the question alone.

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Back in 1840, pressure on the Ottomans to eradicate the slave trade
had been greeted in Constantinople, as the British ambassador in
the city put it, ‘with extreme astonishment and a smile at the
proposition of destroying an institution closely interwoven with the
frame of society’. A decade later, when the sultan found himself
confronted by a devastating combination of military and financial
crises, British support came at a predictable price. In 1854, the
Ottoman government was obliged to issue a decree prohibiting the
slave trade across the Black Sea; three years later the African slave
trade was banned. Also abolished was the jizya, the tax on Jews and
Christians that reached back to the very beginnings of Islam, and
was directly mandated by the Qur’an. Such measures, of course,
risked considerable embarrassment to the sultan. Their effect was,
after all, to reform the Sunna according to the standards of the
thoroughly infidel British. To acknowledge that anything contrary
to Islamic tradition had been forced on a Muslim ruler by Christians
was clearly unthinkable; and so Ottoman reformers instead made
sure to claim a sanction of their own. Circumstances, they argued,
had changed since the time of the Prophet. Insidiously, among elite
circles in the Islamic world, a novel understanding of legal
proprieties was coming to be fostered: an understanding that
derived ultimately not from Muhammad, nor from any Muslim
jurist, but from Saint Paul…
In the United States, escalating tensions over the rights and
wrongs of the institution had helped to precipitate, in 1861, the
secession of a confederacy of southern states, and a terrible war
with what remained of the Union. Naturally, for as long as
Americans continued to slaughter one another in battle, there could
be no definitive resolution of the issue. Nevertheless, at the
beginning of 1863, the United States president, Abraham Lincoln,
had issued a proclamation, declaring all slaves on Confederate
territory to be free. Clearly, should the Unionists only emerge
victorious from the civil war, then slavery was liable to be abolished
across the country. It was in support of this eventuality that the
mayor of Tunis sought to offer his encouragement. Aware that the
Americans were unlikely to be swayed by citations from Islamic
scripture, he concluded his letter by urging them to act instead out
of ‘human mercy and compassion’.

119
 Here, perhaps, lay the ultimate demonstration of just how
effective the attempt by Protestant abolitionists to render their
campaign universal had become. A cause that, only a century earlier,
had been the preserve of a few crankish Quakers had come to
spread far and wide like the rushing wildfire of the Spirit. It did not
need missionaries to promote evangelical doctrines around the
world. Lawyers and ambassadors might achieve it even more
effectively: for they did it, in the main, by stealth. A crime against
humanity was bound to have far more resonance beyond the limits
of the Christian world than a crime against Christ. A crusade, it
turned out, might be more effective for keeping the cross well out
of sight…
The more the tide of global opinion turned against slavery,
so the more the prestige of the nation that had first recanted it was
inevitably burnished. ‘England,’ exclaimed a Persian prince in 1862,
‘assumes to be the determined enemy of the slave trade, and has
gone to an enormous expense to liberate the African races, to whom
she is no way bound save by the tie of a common humanity.’ Yet
already, even as he was expressing his wonderment at such
selflessness, the British were busy capitalising on the prestige it had
won them. In 1857, a treaty that committed the shah to suppressing
the slave trade in the Persian Gulf had also served to consolidate
Britain’s influence over his country. Meanwhile, in the heart of
Africa, missionaries were starting to venture where Europeans had
never before thought to go. Reports they brought back, of the
continuing depredations of Arab slavers, confirmed the view of
many in Britain that slavery would never be wholly banished until

120
the entire continent had been won for civilisation. That this equated
to their own rule was, of course, taken for granted. ‘I will search for
the lost and bring back the strays.’ So God had declared in the
Bible. ‘I will bind up the injured and strengthen the weak, but the
sleek and the strong I will destroy.’ [pages 429-434]

Thirtieth entry 39
For centuries, in the Christian world, it had been the great
project of natural philosophy to identify the laws that animated
God’s creation, and thereby to arrive at a closer understanding of
God himself. Now, with The Origin of Species, a law had been
formulated that—even as it unified the realm of life with that of
time—seemed to have no need of God at all. Not merely a theory,
it was itself a startling display of evolution. But was it right? By
1876, the most impressive evidence for Darwin’s theory had been
uncovered in what was fast proving to be the world’s premier site
for fossil beds: the American West. E.D. Cope was not the only
palaeontologist to have made spectacular discoveries there…
Nervousness at the idea that humanity might have evolved
from another species was not bred merely of a snobbery towards
monkeys. Something much more was at stake. To believe that God
had become man and suffered the death of a slave was to believe
that there might be strength in weakness, and victory in defeat.

39 Editor’s note: When my grandparents were children the

science of eugenics applied to human beings, based on Darwin’s
findings, was flourishing on both sides of the Atlantic. It was
drastically interrupted after the Second World War because after that
war the West decided to do everything backwards from the way
Hitler’s Germany was doing it. The result has been massive dysgenesis
throughout the West, especially as elites flooded their countries with
millions of non-white migrants, many of whom have interbred with
the natives. What Darwin, the subject of this chapter, said between the
lines, Gobineau set out in a whole book. Joseph Arthur, Count de
Gobineau (1816-1882) was the one who elaborated the theory of
Aryan racial superiority in Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races. He
is considered the father of racial demography. Count Gobineau’s
works were seminal to demonstrate that the race factor is central to the
understanding of human history. But after the war, as with eugenics,
his findings were dismissed for ideological reasons.

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Darwin’s theory, more radically than anything that previously
had emerged from Christian civilisation, challenged that
assumption. Weakness was nothing to be valued. Jesus, by
commending the meek and the poor over those better suited to
the great struggle for survival that was existence, had set Homo
sapiens upon the downward path towards degeneration.
For eighteen long centuries, the Christian conviction that all
human life was sacred had been underpinned by one doctrine more
than any other: that man and woman were created in God’s image.
The divine was to be found as much in the pauper, the convict or
the prostitute as it was in the gentleman with his private income
and book-lined study. Darwin’s house, despite its gardens, private
wood and greenhouse filled with orchids, stood on the margins of
an unprecedented agglomeration of brick and smoke. Beyond the
fields where he would lovingly inspect the workings of worms there
stretched what Rome had been in Augustus’ day: the capital of the
largest empire in the world. Just as Rome had once done, London
sheltered disorienting extremes of privilege and squalor. The Britain
of Darwin’s day, though, could boast what no one in Augustus’
Rome had ever thought to sponsor: campaigns to redeem the poor,
the exploited, the diseased.

Darwin himself, the grandson of two prominent

abolitionists, knew full well the impulse from which these sprang.
The great cause of social reform was Christian through and
through. ‘We build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed and the
sick; we institute poor-laws; and our medical men exert their utmost
skill to save the life of every one to the last moment.’ And yet the
verdict delivered by Darwin on these displays of philanthropy was a
fretful one. Much as the Spartans had done, when they flung sickly
babies down a ravine, he dreaded the consequences for the strong
of permitting the weak to propagate themselves. ‘No one who has

122
attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this
must be highly injurious to the race of man.’
Here, for any Quaker, was a peculiarly distressing assertion.
Cope knew the traditions to which he was heir. It was Quakers who
had first lit the fire which, in the recent civil war, had come to
consume the institution of American slavery; it was Quakers who,
in America as in Britain, had taken the lead in campaigning for
prison reform. Whatever they did for the least of their Saviour’s
brothers and sisters, they did for Christ himself. How, then, could
this conviction possibly be squared with what Cope, in mingled
scorn and dread, termed ‘the Darwinian law of the “survival of the
fittest”’? The question was one that had perturbed Darwin himself.
He remained sufficiently a Christian to define any proposal to
abandon the weak and the poor to their fate as ‘evil’. The instincts
that had fostered a concern for the disadvantaged must themselves,
he noted, have been the product of natural selection. Presumably,
then, they had to be reckoned to serve some evolutionary purpose.
Yet Darwin havered. In private conversations he would confess
that, because ‘in our modern civilisation natural selection had no
play’, he feared for the future. Christian notions of charity—however
much he might empathise with them personally—were misplaced.
Only continue to give them free rein, and the peoples who clung to
them were bound to degenerate.
And this, were it to happen, would be to the detriment of
the entire human race. Here, at any rate, Cope was in perfect accord
with Darwin. He had taken the railroad across the vast expanses of
the Great Plains, and he had sent telegrams from forts planted in
the lands of the Sioux, and he had seen their hunting grounds
littered for miles around with the bleached bones of bison, felled by
the very latest in repeating rifles. He knew that Custer’s defeat had
been only a temporary aberration. The native tribes of America
were doomed. The advance of the white race was inexorable. It was
their manifest destiny. This was evident around the world. In
Africa, where a variety of European powers were scheming to carve
up the continent; in Australia, and New Zealand, and Hawaii, where
there was no resisting the influx of white colonists; in Tasmania,
where an entire native people had already been driven to extinction.
‘The grade of their civilisation,’ as Darwin put it, ‘seems to be a
most important element in the success of competing nations.’

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 How were these differences, between a white and a native
American, between a European and a Tasmanian, most plausibly to
be explained? The traditional response of a Christian would have
been to assert that between two human beings of separate races
there was no fundamental difference: both had equally been created
in the image of God. To Darwin, however, his theory of natural
selection suggested a rather different answer. As a young man, he
had sailed the seas of the world, and he had noted how, ‘wherever
the European has trod, death seems to pursue the aboriginal’. His
feelings of compassion for native peoples, and his matching distaste
for white settlers, had not prevented him from arriving at a stark
conclusion: that there had come to exist over the course of human
existence a natural hierarchy of races… The progress of Europeans
had enabled them, generation by generation, to outstrip ‘the
intellectual and social faculties’ of more savage peoples. Cope—
despite his refusal to accept Darwin’s explanation for how and why
this might have happened—conceded that he had a point. Clearly,
in humanity as in any other species, the operations of evolution
were perpetually at work. ‘We all admit the existence of higher and
lower races,’ Cope acknowledged, ‘the latter being those which we
now find to present greater or less approximation to the apes.’

So it was that an attempt by a devout Quaker to reconcile

the workings of God with those of nature brought him to an
understanding of humanity that would have appalled Benjamin Lay.
Cope’s conviction that a species could will itself towards perfection
enabled him to believe as well that different forms of the same
species could co-exist. Whites, he argued, had elevated themselves
to a new degree of consciousness. Other races had not. In 1877, a
year after he had lain amid the fossil beds of Montana, oppressed by
terrible dreams, Edward Drinker Cope formally resigned from the
Society of Friends. [pages 439-444]

124
Thirty-first entry
Capitalism, in Lenin’s opinion, was doomed to collapse. The
workers of the world—the ‘proletariat’—were destined to inherit
the earth. The abyss that yawned between ‘the handful of arrogant
millionaires who wallow in filth and luxury, and the millions of
working people who constantly live on the verge of pauperism’
made the triumph of communism certain. For two weeks, Lenin
and thirty-seven others had been in London to debate how this
coming revolution in the affairs of the world might best be
expedited—but that the laws of evolution made it inevitable none
of them doubted. This was why, as though to a shrine, Lenin had
led his fellow delegates to the museum. It was only a single stop,
however. London had a second, an even holier shrine. The surest
guide to the functioning of human society, and to the parabola of
its future, had been provided not by Darwin, but by a second
bearded thinker who, Job-like, had suffered from bereavement and
boils. Every time Lenin came to London he would visit the great
man’s grave; 1905 was no exception. The moment the congress was
over, Lenin had taken the delegates up to the cemetery in the north
of the city where, twenty-two years earlier, their teacher, the man
who—more than any other—had inspired them to attempt the
transformation of the world, lay buried. Standing before the grave,
the thirty-eight disciples paid their respects to Karl Marx. There had
been only a dozen people at his funeral in 1883.40
None, though, had ever had any doubts as to his epochal
significance. One of the mourners, speaking over the open grave,
had made sure to spell it out. ‘Just as Darwin discovered the law of
evolution as it applies to organic matter, so Marx discovered the law
of evolution as it applies to human history’… Marx, the grandson

40 Editor’s note: That is the year following the deaths of

Darwin and Gobineau. What infected the world after the misnamed
Age of Enlightenment wasn’t racial studies; rather, millions of whites
took as their new Messiah a bearded man. Darwin expected blacks to
become extinct as white peoples took over their territories. It never
occurred to him that Christian ethics would metastasise to such
delusional levels that, in our century, it is whites who may become
extinct.

125
of a rabbi and the son of a Lutheran convert, dismissed both
Judaism and Christianity as ‘stages in the development of the
human mind—different snake skins cast off by history, and man as
the snake who cast them off’. An exile from the Rhineland, expelled
from a succession of European capitals for mocking the religiosity
of Friedrich Wilhelm IV, he had arrived in London with personal
experience of the uses to which religion might be put by autocrats.
Far from amplifying the voices of the suffering, it was a tool of
oppression, employed to stifle and muzzle protest…
‘From each according to his ability, to each according to his
needs.’ Here was a slogan with the clarity of a scientific formula.
Except, of course, that it was no such thing. Its line of descent was
evident to anyone familiar with the Acts of the Apostles. ‘Selling
their possessions and goods, they gave to everyone as he had need.’
Repeatedly throughout Christian history, the communism practised
by the earliest Church had served radicals as their inspiration. Marx,
when he dismissed questions of morality and justice as
epiphenomena, was concealing the true germ of his revolt against
capitalism behind jargon. A beard, he had once joked, was
something ‘without which no prophet can succeed’…
Marx’s interpretation of the world appeared fuelled by
certainties that had no obvious source in his model of economics.
They rose instead from profounder depths. Again and again, the
magma flow of his indignation would force itself through the crust
of his scientific-sounding prose. For a self-professed materialist, he
was oddly prone to seeing the world as the Church Fathers had
once done: as a battleground between cosmic forces of good and
evil… The very words used by Marx to construct his model of class
struggle—‘exploitation’, ‘enslavement’, ‘avarice’—owed less to the
chill formulations of economists than to something far older: the
claims to divine inspiration of the biblical prophets. If, as he
insisted, he offered his followers a liberation from Christianity, then
it was one that seemed eerily like a recalibration of it. Lenin and his
fellow delegates, meeting in London that spring of 1905, would
have been contemptuous of any such notion, of course. Religion—
opium of the people that it was—would need, if the victory of the
proletariat were properly to be secured, to be eradicated utterly.
Oppression in all its forms had to be eliminated. The ends justified
the means. Lenin’s commitment to this principle was absolute.
Already, the single-mindedness with which he insisted on it had

126
precipitated schism in the ranks of Marx’s followers. The congress
held in London had been exclusively for those of them who defined
themselves as Bolsheviks: the ‘Majority’.

Lenin in in Razliv village by Viktor Tsvetkov.

Communists who insisted, in opposition to Lenin, on

working alongside liberals, on confessing qualms about violence, on
worrying that Lenin’s ambitions for a tightly organised, strictly
disciplined party threatened dictatorship, were not truly communists
at all—just a sect. Sternly, like the Donatists, the Bolsheviks
dismissed any suggestion of compromising with the world as it was.
Eagerly, like the Taborites, they yearned to see the apocalypse
arrive, to see paradise established on earth. Fiercely, like the
Diggers, they dreamed of an order in which land once held by
aristocrats and kings would become the property of the people, a
common treasury. Lenin, who was reported to admire both the
Anabaptists of Münster and Oliver Cromwell, was not entirely
contemptuous of the past. Proofs of what was to come were
plentiful there. History, like an arrow, was proceeding on its
implacable course. Capitalism was destined to collapse, and the
paradise lost by humanity at the beginning of time to be restored.
Those who doubted it had only to read the teachings and
prophecies of their great teacher to be reassured.
The hour of salvation lay at hand. [pages 454-458]

127
Thirty-second entry
‘Do we not hear the noise of the grave-diggers who are
burying God? Do we not smell the divine putrefaction?—for even
gods putrefy! God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed
him.’ To read these words beside the Somme [during WWI—Ed.],
amid a landscape turned to mud and ash, and littered with the
mangled bodies of men, was to shiver before the possibility that
there might not be, after all, any redemption in sacrifice. Nietzsche
had written them back in 1882: the parable of a madman who one
bright morning lit a lantern and ran to the marketplace, where no
one among his listeners would believe his news that God had bled
to death beneath their knives.
Little in Nietzsche’s upbringing seemed to have prefigured
such blasphemy. The son of a Lutheran pastor, and named after
Friedrich Wilhelm IV, his background had been one of pious
provincialism. Precocious and brilliant, he had obtained a
professorship when he was only twenty-four; but then, only a
decade later, had resigned it to become a shabbily genteel bum.
Finally, seeming to confirm the sense of a squandered career, he
had suffered a terrible mental breakdown. For the last eleven years
of his life, he had been confined to a succession of clinics.41 Few,
when he finally died in 1900, had read the books that, in an
escalating frenzy of production, he had written before his collapse
into madness. Posthumously, though, his fame had grown with
startling rapidity. By 1914, when Otto Dix marched to war with his
writings in his knapsack, Nietzsche’s name had emerged to become
one of the most controversial in Europe. Condemned by many as
the most dangerous thinker who had ever lived, others hailed him
as a prophet. There were many who considered him both.
Nietzsche was not the first to have become a byword for
atheism, of course. No one, though—not Spinoza, not Darwin, not
Marx—had ever before dared to gaze quite so unblinkingly at what

41Editor’s note: Actually, he was briefly institutionalised. Most

of the years following the psychotic crisis of January 1889 (some
biographers would date it on December 1888), Nietzsche spent his
time at home with his mother, and later with his sister.

128
the murder of its god might mean for a civilisation. ‘When one
gives up the Christian faith, one pulls the right to Christian morality
out from under one's feet.’ 42 Nietzsche’s loathing for those who
imagined otherwise was intense. Philosophers he scorned as secret
priests. Socialists, communists, democrats: all were equally
deluded. ‘Naiveté: as if morality could survive when the God who
sanctions it is missing!’ Enthusiasts for the Enlightenment, self-
proclaimed rationalists who imagined that men and women
possessed inherent rights, Nietzsche regarded with contempt. It
was not from reason that their doctrine of human dignity derived,
but rather from the very faith that they believed themselves—in
their conceit—to have banished. Proclamations of rights were
nothing but flotsam and jetsam left behind by the retreating tide of
Christianity: bleached and stranded relics. God was dead—but in
the great cave that once had been Christendom his shadow still fell,
an immense and frightful shadow.43
For centuries, perhaps, it would linger. Christianity had
reigned for two millennia. It could not easily be banished. Its myths
would long endure. They were certainly no less mythical for casting
themselves as secular. ‘Such phantoms as the dignity of man, the
dignity of labour’: these were Christian through and through.44
Nietzsche did not mean this as a compliment. It was not
just as frauds that he despised those who clung to Christian
morality, even as their knives were dripping with the blood of God;
he loathed them as well for believing in it. Concern for the lowly
and the suffering, far from serving the cause of justice, was a form
of poison. Nietzsche, more radically than many a theologian, had

42 Editor’s note: On my website I have been quoting the full

quote, which includes a strong criticism of the English who subscribe

to so-called secular humanism: ‘In England one must rehabilitate
oneself after every little emancipation from theology by showing in a
veritably awe-inspiring manner what a moral fanatic one is. That is
the penance they pay there. —We others hold otherwise. When one
gives up the Christian faith, one pulls the right to Christian morality out
from under one's feet.’
43 Editor’s note: The title of this chapter is precisely ‘Shadow’.
44 Editor’s note: The key to understanding the West’s darkest

hour was provided to me by the sombre final pages of William Pierce’s

history of the white race, Who We Are. History has an enormous
inertia, and if we want to understand the present we must know that
we are slaves to this inertia.

129
penetrated to the heart of everything that was most shocking about
the Christian faith. ‘To devise something which could even
approach the seductive, intoxicating, anaesthetising, and corrupting
power of that symbol of the “holy cross”, that horrific paradox of
the “crucified God”, that mystery of an inconceivably ultimate,
most extreme cruelty and self-crucifixion undertaken for the
salvation of mankind?’ Like Paul, Nietzsche knew it to be a
scandal. Unlike Paul, he found it repellent. The spectacle of Christ
being tortured to death had been bait for the powerful. It had
persuaded them—the strong and the healthy, the beautiful and the
brave, the powerful and the self-assured—that it was their natural
inferiors, the hungry and the humble, who deserved to inherit the
earth. 45
‘Helping and caring for others, being of use to others,
constantly excites a sense of power.’ Charity, in Christendom, had
become a means to dominate. Yet Christianity, by taking the side of
everything ill-constituted, and weak, and feeble, had made all of
humanity sick. Its ideals of compassion and equality before God
were bred not of love, but of hatred: a hatred of the deepest and
most sublime order, one that had transformed the very character of
morality, a hatred the like of which had never before been seen on
earth.
This was the revolution that Paul—‘that hate-obsessed
false-coiner’—had set in motion. The weak had conquered the
strong; the slaves had vanquished their masters. ‘Ruined by cunning,
secret, invisible, anaemic vampires! Not conquered—only sucked
dry! Covert revengefulness, petty envy become master!’ Nietzsche,
when he mourned antiquity’s beasts of prey, did so with the passion
of a scholar who had devoted his life to the study of their
civilisation… That Nietzsche himself was a short-sighted invalid
prone to violent migraines had done nothing to inhibit his
admiration for the aristocracies of antiquity, and their heedlessness
towards the sick and the weak. A society focused on the feeble was
a society enfeebled itself. This it was that had rendered Christians
such malevolent blood-suckers. If it was the taming of the Romans

45Editor’s note: The fact that whites today are literally handing
over their lands to prolific non-white migrants while inhibiting their
own birth rates is the greatest self-betrayal and psychosis ever to occur
in History: a phenomenon that must be pondered thoroughly until we
understand what is going on.

130
that Nietzsche chiefly rued, then he regretted as well how they had
battened onto other nations.

Otto Dix’s life-size bust

of Nietzsche. Holland
himself took this photo.

Nietzsche himself, whose contempt for the Germans was

exceeded only by his disdain for the English, had so little time for
nationalism that he had renounced his Prussian citizenship when he
was only twenty-four, and died stateless; and yet, for all that, he had
always lamented the fate of his forebears. Once, before the coming
of Boniface, the forests had sheltered Saxons who, in their ferocity
and their hunger for everything that was richest and most intense in
life, had been predators no less glorious than lions: ‘blond beasts’.
But then the missionaries had arrived. The blond beast had been
tempted into a monastery. ‘There he now lay, sick, wretched,
malevolent toward himself; filled with hatred of the vital drives,
filled with suspicion towards all that was still strong and happy. In
short, a “Christian”.’

131
Thirty-third entry
‘Wherever you find them, beat up the Fascists!’
The name derived from the palmy days of ancient Rome.
The fasces, a bundle of scourging rods, had served the guards
appointed to elected magistrates as emblems of their authority. Not
every magistrate in Roman history, though, had necessarily been
elected. Times of crisis had demanded exceptional measures. Julius
Caesar, following his defeat of Pompey, had been
appointed dictator: an office that had permitted him to take sole
control of the state. Each of his guards had carried on their
shoulders, bundled up with the scourging rods, an axe. Nietzsche,
predicting that a great convulsion was approaching, a repudiation of
the pusillanimous Christian doctrines of equality and compassion,
had foretold as well that those who led the revolution would
‘become devisers of emblems and phantoms in their enmity’. Time
had proven him right. The fasces had become the badge of a
brilliantly successful movement.
By 1930, Italy was ruled—as it had been two millennia
previously—by a dictator. Benito Mussolini, an erstwhile socialist
whose reading of Nietzsche had led him, by the end of the Great
War, to dream of forming a new breed of man, an elite worthy of a
fascist state, cast himself both as Caesar and as the face of a
gleaming future. From the fusion of ancient and modern, melded by
the white-hot genius of his leadership, there was to emerge a new
Italy. Whether greeting the massed ranks of his followers with a
Roman salute or piloting an aircraft, Mussolini posed in ways that
consciously sought to erase the entire span of Christian history.
Although, in a country as profoundly Catholic as Italy, he had little
choice but to cede a measure of autonomy to the Church, his
ultimate aim was to subordinate it utterly, to render it the handmaid
of the fascist state. Mussolini’s more strident followers exulted
nakedly in this goal. ‘Yes indeed, we are totalitarians! We want to be
from morning to evening, without distracting thoughts.’
In Berlin too there were such men. The storm troopers of a
movement that believed simultaneously in racism and in the
subordination of all personal interests to a common good, they
called themselves Nationalsozialisten: ‘National Socialists’. Their
opponents, in mockery of their pretensions, called them Nazis. But

132
this only betrayed fear. The National Socialists courted the hatred
of their foes. An enemy’s loathing was something to be welcomed.
It was the anvil on which a new Germany was to be forged. ‘It is not
compassion but courage and toughness that save life, because war is
life's eternal disposition.’ As in Italy, so in Germany, fascism
worked to combine the glamour and the violence of antiquity with
that of the modern world. There was no place in this vision of the
future for the mewling feebleness of Christianity. The blond beast
was to be liberated from his monastery. A new age had dawned.
Adolf Hitler, the leader of the Nazis, was not, as Mussolini could
claim to be, an intellectual; but he did not need to be.
Over the course of a life that had embraced living in a
dosshouse, injury at the Somme, and imprisonment for an
attempted putsch, he had come to feel himself summoned by a
mysterious providence to transform the world. Patchily read in
philosophy and science he might be, but of one thing he was
viscerally certain: destiny was written in a people’s blood. There was
no universal morality. A Russian was not a German. Every nation
was different, and a people that refused to listen to the dictates of its
soul was a people doomed to extinction. ‘All who are not of good
race in this world,’ Hitler warned, ‘are chaff.’
Once, in the happy days of their infancy, the German people
had been at one with the forests in which they lived. They had
existed as a tree might: not just as the sum of its branches, its twigs
and its leaves, but as a living, organic whole. But then the soil from
which the Nordic race were sprung had been polluted. Their sap
had been poisoned. Their limbs had been cut back. Only surgery
could save them now. Hitler’s policies, although rooted in a sense
of race as something primordially ancient, were rooted as well in the
clinical formulations of evolutionary theory. The measures that
would restore purity to the German people were prescribed equally
by ancient chronicles and by Darwinist textbooks. To eliminate
those who stood in the way of fulfilling such a programme was not
a crime, but a responsibility. ‘Apes massacre all fringe elements as
alien to their community.’ Hitler did not hesitate to draw the logical
conclusion. ‘What is valid for monkeys must be all the more valid
for humans.’ Man was as subject to the struggle for life, and to the
need to preserve the purity of his race, as any other species. To put
this into practice was not cruelty. It was simply the way of the
world…

133
 In 1933, the year that Hitler was appointed chancellor,
Protestant churches across Germany marked the annual celebration
of the Reformation by singing Wessel’s battle hymn. In Berlin
Cathedral, a pastor shamelessly aped Goebbels. Wessel, he
preached, had died just as Jesus had died. Then, just for good
measure, he added that Hitler was ‘a man sent by God’.46 Yet
Christians, if they thought this would curry favour with the Nazi
leadership, let alone influence it, were deluding themselves. To
parody Christianity was not to show it respect, but to cannibalise it.
Out in the woods, eager young National Socialists would burn
copies of the Bible on great fires, and then—‘to prove how we
despise all the cults of the world except the ideology of Hitler’—
sing the Horst Wessel Lied. On the Rhine, in the amphitheatres of
what had once been Roman cities, girls might gather by night to
celebrate Wessel’s birthday with dances and prayers to his spirit, ‘to
make them good bearers of children’.
Boniface, travelling across the Rhine twelve hundred years
before, had witnessed very similar things. Dismay at the spectacle of
pagan practices in a supposedly Christian land had led him to
devote much of his life to combating them. Now, though, his heirs
faced an even more grievous threat. Missionaries to Germany in the
eighth century had been able to count on the support of the
Frankish monarchy in their labours. No such backing was
forthcoming from the Nazis. Hitler, who in 1928 had loudly
proclaimed his movement to be Christian, had come to regard
Christianity with active hostility. Its morality, its concern for the
weak, he had always viewed as cowardly and shameful. Now that he
was in power, he recognised in the claim of the Church to a sphere
distinct from the state—that venerable inheritance from the
Gregorian revolution—a direct challenge to the totalitarian mission
of National Socialism. Although, like Mussolini, Hitler was willing
to tread carefully at first—and even, in 1933, to sign a concordat

46 Editor’s note: Horst Wessel (1907-1930) was a Berlin leader

of the NSDAP’s SA, killed by Communists and became a National
Socialist martyr. A march he had written the lyrics to was renamed
the Horst Wessel Lied and became the co-national anthem of NS
Germany. After the war the lyrics and tune of his song were made
illegal in Germany, his memorial vandalised and his gravestone and
remains destroyed.

134
with the papacy—he had no intention of holding to it for long.
Christian morality had resulted in any number of grotesque
excrescences: alcoholics breeding promiscuously while upstanding
national comrades struggled to put food on the table for their
families; mental patients enjoying clean sheets while healthy
children were obliged to sleep three or four to a bed; cripples
having money and attention lavished on them that should properly
be devoted to the fit. Idiocies such as these were precisely what
National Socialism existed to terminate. The churches had had their
day. The new order, if it were to endure for a millennium, would
require a new order of man. It would require Übermenschen.

By 1937, then, Hitler had begun to envisage the elimination

of Christianity once and for all. The objections of church leaders to
the state’s ongoing sterilisation of idiots and cripples infuriated him.
His own preference—one that he fully intended to act upon in the
event of war—was for euthanasia to be applied in a comprehensive
manner. This, a policy that was sanctioned both by ancient example
and by the most advanced scientific thinking, was something that
the German people needed urgently to be brought to accept.
Clearly, there was no prospect of them fulfilling their racial destiny
while they were still cancerous with compassion. Among
the Schutzstaffel, the elite paramilitary organisation that served as
the most efficient instrument of Hitler’s will, the destruction of
Christianity came to be regarded as a particular vocation. Heinrich
Himmler, the commander of the SS, plotted a fifty-year programme
that he trusted would see the religion utterly erased. Otherwise,
Christianity might once again prove the bane of the blond beast.
For the Germans to continue in their opposition to policies
so transparently vital for their own racial health was insanity.

135
‘Harping on and on that God died on the cross out of pity for the
weak, the sick, and the sinners, they then demand that the
genetically diseased be kept alive in the name of a doctrine of pity
that goes against nature, and of a misconceived notion of
humanity.’ The strong, as science had conclusively demonstrated,
had both a duty and an obligation to eliminate the weak. Yet if
Christianity—as Hitler had come to believe—was ‘the heaviest blow
that ever struck humanity’, then it was not enough merely to
eradicate it. A religion so pernicious that it had succeeded both in
destroying the Roman Empire and in spawning Bolshevism could
hardly have emerged from nowhere. What source of infection could
possibly have bred such a plague? Clearly, there was no more
pressing question for a National Socialist to answer. Whatever the
bacillus, it needed to be identified fast, and—if the future of the
German people were to be set on stable foundations, enduring
enough to last for a thousand years—destroyed. [pages 471-476]

Thirty-fourth entry 47
In 1938, a German editor wishing to publish him had
written to ask if he were of Jewish origin. ‘I regret,’ Tolkien had
replied, ‘that I appear to have no ancestors of that gifted people.’
That the Nazis’ racism lacked any scientific basis he took for
granted; but his truest objection to it was as a Christian. Of course,
steeped in the literature of the Middle Ages as he was, he knew full
well the role played by his own Church in the stereotyping and
persecution of the Jews. In his imaginings, however, he saw them
not as the hook-nosed vampires of medieval calumny, but rather as
‘a holy race of valiant men, the people of Israel the lawful children
of God’. These lines, from an Anglo-Saxon poem on the crossing
of the Red Sea, were precious to Tolkien, for he had translated
them himself. There was in them the same sense of identification
with Exodus as had inspired Bede. Moses, in the poem, was
represented as a mighty king, ‘a prince of men with a marching

47 Editor’s note: The section ‘In the Darkness Bind Them’ of

Holland’s chapter ‘Shadow’ opens with a few pages describing the life
and work of J.R.R. Tolkien and mentions the fascinating anecdote that,
in the muddy trenches of the Somme in the First World War, soldiers
Tolkien and Hitler were on opposite sides. Otto Dix, mentioned in a
previous entry, was also on the side fighting against Tolkien.

136
company’. Tolkien, writing The Lord of the Rings even as the Nazis
were expanding their empire from the Atlantic to Russia, draw
freely on such poetry for his own epic. Central to the plot was the
return of a king: an heir to a long-abandoned throne named
Aragorn. If the armies of Mordor were satanic like those of
Pharaoh, then Aragorn—emerging from exile to deliver his people
from slavery—had more than a touch of Moses. As in Bede’s
monastery, so in Tolkien’s study: a hero might be imagined as
simultaneously Christian and Jewish. This was no isolated, donnish
eccentricity. Across Europe, the readiness of Christians to identify
themselves with the Jews had become the measure of their response
to the greatest catastrophe in Jewish history. Tolkien—ever the
devout Catholic—was doing nothing that popes had not also done.
In September 1938, the ailing Pius XI had declared himself
spiritually a Jew.
One year later, with Poland defeated and subjected by
German forces to an unspeakably brutal occupation, his successor
had issued his first public letter to the faithful. Pius XII, lamenting
the ploughing of blood-drenched furrows with swords, pointedly
cited Paul: ‘There is neither Jew nor Greek.’ Always, from the
earliest days of the Church, this was a phrase that had particularly
served to distinguish Christianismos from Ioudaismos, Christianity
from Judaism. Between Christians, who celebrated the Church as
the mother of all nations, and Jews, appalled at any prospect of
having their distinctiveness melt away into the great mass of
humanity, the dividing line had long been stark. But that was not
how it seemed to the Nazis.

137
 When Pius XII quoted Genesis to rebuke those who would
forget that humanity had a common origin, and that all the peoples
of the world had a duty of charity to one another, the response
from Nazi theorists was vituperative. To them, it appeared self-
evident that universal morality was a fraud perpetrated by Jews.
‘Can we still tolerate our children being obliged to learn that Jews
and Negroes, just like Germans or Romans, are descended from
Adam and Eve, simply because a Jewish myth says so?’ Not merely
pernicious, the doctrine that all were one in Christ ranked as an
outrage against the fundamentals of science. For centuries, the
Nordic race had been infected by it. The consequence was a
mutilation of what should properly have been left whole: a
circumcision of the mind. ‘It is the Jew Paul who must be
considered as the father of all this, as he, in a very significant way,
established the principles of the destruction of a worldview based
on blood.’
Christians, confronted by a regime committed to the
repudiation of the most fundamental tenets of their faith—the
oneness of the human race, the obligation of care for the weak and
the suffering—had a choice to make. Did the Church, as a pastor
named Dietrich Bonhoeffer had put it as early as 1933, have ‘an
unconditional obligation towards the victims of any social order,
even where those victims do not belong to the Christian
community’—or did it not? Bonhoeffer’s own answer to that
question would see him conspire against Hitler’s life, and end up
being hanged in a concentration camp. There were many other
Christians too who passed the test. Some spoke out publicly.
Others, more clandestinely, did what they could to shelter their
Jewish neighbours, in cellars and attics, in the full awareness that to
do so was to risk their own lives. Church leaders, torn between
speaking with the voice of prophecy against crimes almost beyond
their comprehension and a dread that to do so might risk the very
future of Christianity, walked an impossible tightrope. ‘They
deplore the fact that the Pope does not speak,’ Pius had lamented
privately in December 1942. ‘But the pope cannot speak. If he
spoke, things would be worse.’
Perhaps, as his critics would later charge, he should have
spoken anyway. But Pius understood the limits of his power. By
pushing things too far he might risk such measures as he was able
to take. Jews themselves understood this well enough. In the pope’s

138
summer residence, five hundred were given shelter. In Hungary,
priests frantically issued baptismal certificates, knowing that they
might be shot for doing so. In Romania, papal diplomats pressed
the government not to deport their country’s Jews—and the trains
were duly halted by ‘bad weather’. Among the SS, the pope was
derided as a rabbi.48
Otto Dix, far from admiring the Nazis for turning the world
on its head, was revolted by them. They in turn dismissed him as a
degenerate. Sacked from his teaching post in Dresden, forbidden to
exhibit his paintings, he had turned to the Bible as his surest source
of inspiration. In 1939, he had painted the destruction of Sodom.
Fire was shown consuming a city that was unmistakably Dresden.
The image had proven prophetic. As the tide of war turned against
Germany, so British and American planes had begun to visit ruin
on the country’s cities. In July 1943, in an operation code-named
Gomorrah, a great sea of fire had engulfed much of Hamburg. Back
in Britain, a bishop named George Bell—a close friend of
Bonhoeffer’s—spoke out in public protest. ‘If it is permissible to
drive inhabitants to desire peace by making them suffer, why not
admit pillage, burning, torture, murder, violation?’ The objection
was brushed aside. There was no place, the bishop was sternly
informed, in a war against an enemy as terrible as Hitler, for
humanitarian or sentimental scruples. In February 1945, it was the
turn of Dresden to burn. The most beautiful city in Germany was
reduced to ashes. So too was much else. By the time the country
was at last brought to unconditional surrender in May 1945, most of
it lay in ruins. [pages 481-485]

48 Editor’s note: Keep in mind that this happened before the

Second Vatican Council. Catholic racialists are either ignorant or
dishonest in facing the fact that the Christian mind was already
infected before such a Council.

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Thirty-fifth entry 49
Sunday, 25 June. In St John’s Wood, one of London’s most
affluent neighbourhoods, churchgoers were heading to evensong.
Not the world’s most famous band, though. The Beatles were
booked to play their largest-ever gig. For the first time, a
programme featuring live sequences from different countries was to
be broadcast simultaneously around the world—and the British
Broadcasting Corporation, for its segment, had put up John
Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr. The
studios on Abbey Road were where, for the past five years, the
Beatles had been recording the songs that had transformed popular
music, and made them the most idolised young men on the planet.
Now, before an audience of 350 million, they were recording their
latest single. The song, with a chorus that anyone could sing, was
joyously, catchily anthemic. Its message, written on cardboard
placards in an assortment of languages, was intended to be readily
accessible to a global village. Flowers, streamers and balloons all
added to the sense of a party. John Lennon, alternately singing and
chewing heavily on a wad of gum, offered the watching world a
prescription with which neither Aquinas, nor Augustine, nor Saint
Paul would have disagreed: ‘all you need is love’.
God, after all, was love. This was what it said in the Bible.
For two thousand years, men and women had been pondering this
revelation. Love, and do as you will. Many were the Christians who,
over the course of the centuries, had sought to put this precept of
Augustine’s into practice. For then, as a Hussite preacher had put it,
‘Paradise will open to us, benevolence will be multiplied, and
perfect love will abound.’ But what if there were wolves? What then
were the lambs to do? The Beatles themselves had grown up in a

49 Editor’s note: The mention of Otto Dix above is fascinating.

Despite the bust he had made of Nietzsche, his readings of the
philosopher and his having fought on Hitler’s side at the Somme, he
suffered a psychogenic regression towards Tolkien’s side. In the
following decades, as we shall see in our excerpts of the final chapters
of Dominion, Christian morality would exacerbate and triumph in the
collective unconscious of every white man—especially atheists.

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world scarred by war. Great stretches of Liverpool, their native city,
had been levelled by German bombs. Their apprenticeship as a
band had been in Hamburg, served in clubs manned by limbless ex-
Nazis. Now, even as they sang their message of peace, the world
again lay in the shadow of conflict.
Only three weeks before the broadcast from Abbey Road,
war had broken out in the Holy Land. The blackened carcasses of
Egyptian and Syrian planes littered landscapes once trodden by
biblical patriarchs. Israel, the Jewish homeland promised by the
British in 1917, and which had finally been founded in 1948, had
won in only six days a stunning victory over neighbours pledged to
its annihilation. Jerusalem, the city of David, was—for the first time
since the age of the Caesars—under Jewish rule. Yet this offered no
resolution to the despair and misery of those displaced from what
had previously been Palestine. Just the opposite. Across the world,
like napalm in a Vietnamese jungle, hatreds seemed to be burning
out of control. Most terrifying of all were the tensions between the
world’s two superpowers, the Soviet Union and the United States.
Victory over Hitler had brought Russian troops into the heart of
Europe. Communist governments had been installed in ancient
Christian capitals: Warsaw, Budapest, Prague. An iron curtain now
ran across the continent. Armed as both sides were with nuclear
missiles, weapons so lethal that they had the potential to wipe out
all of life on earth, the stakes were grown apocalyptic. Humanity
had arrogated to itself what had always previously been viewed as a
divine prerogative: the power to end the world.
How, then, could love possibly be enough? The Beatles—
although roundly mocked for their message—were not alone in
believing that it might be. A decade earlier, in the depths of the
American South, a Baptist pastor named Martin Luther King had
pondered what Christ had meant by urging his followers to love
their enemies. ‘Far from being the pious injunction of a utopian
dreamer, this command is an absolute necessity for the survival of
our civilisation. Yes, it is love that will save our world and our
civilization, love even for enemies.’ King had not claimed, as the
Beatles would in ‘All You Need Is Love’, that it was easy. He spoke
as a black man, to a black congregation, living in a society blighted
by institutionalised oppression. The civil war, although it had ended
slavery, had not ended racism and segregation.

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 In the spring of 1963, writing from jail, he had reflected on
how Saint Paul had carried the gospel of freedom to where it was
most needed, heedless of the risks. Summoning the white clergy to
break their silence and to speak out against the injustices suffered
by blacks, King had invoked the authority of Aquinas and of his
own namesake, Martin Luther. Above all, though—answering the
charge of extremism—he had appealed to the example of his
Saviour. Laws that sanctioned the hatred and persecution of one
race by another, he declared, were laws that Christ himself would
have broken. ‘Was not Jesus an extremist for love?’
The campaign for civil rights gave to Christianity an overt
centrality in American politics that it had not had since the decades
before the Civil War. King, by stirring the slumbering conscience of
white Christians, succeeded in setting his country on a
transformative new path. To talk of love as Paul had talked of it, as
a thing greater than prophecy, or knowledge, or faith, had once
again become a revolutionary act. King’s dream, that the glory of
the Lord would be revealed, and all flesh see it together, helped to
animate a great yearning across America—in West Coast coffee
shops as in Alabama churches, on verdant campuses as on picket
lines, among attorneys as among refuse-workers—for justice to roll
on like a river, and righteousness like a never-failing stream. This
was the same vision of progress that, in the eighteenth century, had
inspired Quakers and Evangelicals to campaign for the abolition of
slavery; but now, in the 1960s, the spark that had set it to flame
with a renewed brilliance was the faith of African Americans…

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 That the Beatles agreed with King on the importance of
love and had refused as a matter of principle to play for segregated
audiences, did not mean that they were—as James Brown might
have put it—‘holy’. Even though Lennon had first met McCartney
at a church fête, all four had long since abandoned their childhood
Christianity. It was, in the words of McCartney, a ‘goody-goody
thing’: fine, perhaps, for a lonely woman wearing a face that she
kept in a jar by the door, but not for a band that had conquered the
world. Churches were stuffy, old-fashioned, boring—everything
that the Beatles were not. In England, even the odd bishop had
begun to suggest that the traditional Christian understanding of
God was outmoded, and that the only rule was love.
In 1966, when Lennon claimed in a newspaper interview
that the Beatles were ‘more popular than Jesus’, eyebrows were
barely raised in his home country. Only four months later, after his
comment had been reprinted in an American magazine, did the
backlash hit. Pastors across the United States had long been
suspicious of the Beatles. This was especially so in the South—the
Bible Belt. Preachers there—unwittingly backing Lennon’s point—
fretted that Beatlemania had become a form of idolatry; some even
worried that it was all a communist plot. To many white
evangelicals—shamed by the summons to repentance issued them
by King, baffled by the sense of a moral fervour that had originated
outside their own churches, and horrified by the spectacle of their
daughters screaming and wetting themselves at the sight of four
peculiar-looking Englishmen—the chance to trash Beatles records
came as a blessed relief. Simultaneously, to racists unpersuaded by
the justice of the civil rights movement, it provided an opportunity
to rally the troops. The Ku Klux Klan leapt at the chance to cast
themselves as the defender of Protestant values. Not content with
burning records, they set to burning Beatles wigs. The band’s
distinctive hairstyle—a shaggy mop top—seemed to clean-cut
Klansmen a blasphemy in itself. ‘It’s hard for me to tell through the
mopheads,’ one of them snarled, ‘whether they’re even white or
black.’
None of which did much to alter Lennon’s views on
Christianity. The Beatles did not—as Martin Luther King had
done—derive their understanding of love as the force that animated
the universe from a close reading of scripture. Instead, they took it
for granted. Cut loose from its theological moorings, the

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distinctively Christian understanding of love that had done so much
to animate the civil rights movement began to float free over an ever
more psychedelic landscape. The Beatles were not alone, that
summer of 1967, in ‘turning funny’. Beads and bongs were
everywhere. Evangelicals were appalled. To them, the emergence of
long-haired freaks with flowers in their hair seemed sure
confirmation of the satanic turn that the world was taking. Blissed-
out talk of peace and love was pernicious sloganeering: just a cover
for drugs and sex…
Then, the following April, Martin Luther King was shot
dead. An entire era seemed to have been gunned down with him:
one in which liberals and conservatives, black progressives and
white evangelicals, had felt able—however inadequately—to feel
joined by a shared sense of purpose. As news of King’s
assassination flashed across America, cities began to burn: Chicago,
Washington, Baltimore. Black militants, impatient even before
King’s murder with his pacifism and talk of love, pushed for violent
confrontation with the white establishment. Many openly derided
Christianity as a slave religion. Other activists, following where
King’s campaign against racism had led, demanded the righting of
what they saw as no less grievous sins. If it were wrong for blacks to
be discriminated against, then why not women, or
homosexuals? Increasingly, to Americans disoriented by the moral
whirligig of the age, Evangelicals promised solid ground. A place of
refuge, though, might just as well be a place under siege. To many
Evangelicals, feminism and the gay rights movement were an
assault on Christianity itself. Equally, to many feminists and gay
activists, Christianity appeared synonymous with everything that
they were struggling against: injustice, and bigotry, and persecution.
God, they were told, hates fags.
But did he? Conservatives, when they charged their
opponents with breaking biblical commandments, had the heft of
two thousand years of Christian tradition behind them; but so too,
when they pressed for gender equality or gay rights, did liberals.
Their immediate model and inspiration was, after all, a Baptist
preacher. ‘There is no graded scale of essential worth,’ King had
written a year before his assassination. ‘Every human being has
etched in his personality the indelible stamp of the Creator. Every
man must be respected because God loves him.’

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 Every woman too, a feminist might have added. Yet King’s
words, while certainly bearing witness to an instinctive strain of
patriarchy within Christianity, bore witness as well to why, across
the Western world, this was coming to seem a problem. That every
human being possessed an equal dignity was not remotely self-
evident a truth. A Roman would have laughed at it. To campaign
against discrimination on the grounds of gender or sexuality,
however, was to depend on large numbers of people sharing in a
common assumption: that everyone possessed an inherent worth.
The origins of this principle—as Nietzsche had so
contemptuously pointed out—lay not in the French Revolution, nor
in the Declaration of Independence, nor in the Enlightenment, but
in the Bible. Ambivalences that came to roil Western society in the
1970s had always been perfectly manifest in the letters of Paul.
Writing to the Corinthians, the apostle had pronounced that man
was the head of woman; writing to the Galatians, he had exulted
that there was no man or woman in Christ. Balancing his stern
condemnation of same-sex relationships had been his rapturous
praise of love. Raised a Pharisee, learned in the Law of Moses, he
had come to proclaim the primacy of conscience. The knowledge of
what constituted a just society was written not with ink but with the
Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone but on human
hearts. Love, and do as you will. It was—as the entire course of
Christian history so vividly demonstrated—a formula for
revolution. ‘The wind blows wherever it pleases.’ That the times
they were a-changin’ was a message Christ himself had taught.
Again and again, Christians had found themselves touched by
God’s spirit; again and again, they had found themselves brought by
it into the light. Now, though, the Spirit had taken on a new form.
No longer Christian, it had become a vibe. Not to get down with it
was to be stranded on the wrong side of history. The concept of
progress, unyoked from the theology that had given it birth, had
begun to leave Christianity trailing in its wake.
The choice that faced churches—an agonisingly difficult
one—was whether to sit in the dust, shaking their fists at it in
impotent rage, or whether to run and scramble in a desperate
attempt to catch up with it. Should women be allowed to become
priests? Should homosexuality be condemned as sodomy or praised
as love? Should the age-old Christian project of trammelling sexual
appetites be maintained or eased? None of these questions were

145
easily answered. To those who took them seriously, they ensured
endless and pained debate. To those who did not, they provided yet
further evidence—if evidence were needed—that Christianity was
on its way out. John Lennon had been right. ‘It will vanish and
shrink. I needn’t argue about that; I know I’m right and I will be
proved right.’
Yet atheists faced challenges of their own. Christians were
not alone in struggling to square the rival demands of tradition and
progress. Lennon, after walking out on his song-writing partnership
with McCartney, celebrated his liberation with a song that listed
Jesus alongside the Beatles as idols in which he no longer believed.
Then, in October 1971, he released a new single: ‘Imagine’. The
song offered Lennon’s prescription for global peace. Imagine
there’s no heaven, he sang, no hell below us. Yet the lyrics were
religious through and through. Dreaming of a better world, a
brotherhood of man, was a venerable tradition in Lennon’s neck of
the woods. St George’s Hill, his home throughout the heyday of the
Beatles, was where the Diggers had laboured three hundred years
previously. Rather than emulate Winstanley, however, Lennon had
holed up inside a gated community, complete with a Rolls-Royce
and swimming pool. ‘One wonders what they do with all their
dough.’ So a pastor had mused back in 1966. The video of
‘Imagine’, in which Lennon was seen gliding around his recently
purchased seventy-two-acre Berkshire estate, provided the answer.
In its hypocrisy no less than in its dreams of a universal peace,
Lennon’s atheism was recognisably bred of Christian marrow. A
good preacher, however, was always able to take his flock with him.
The spectacle of Lennon imagining a world without possessions
while sitting in a huge mansion did nothing to put off his admirers.
As Nietzsche spun furiously in his grave, ‘Imagine’ became the
anthem of atheism.
A decade later, when Lennon was shot dead by a crazed fan,
he was mourned not just as one half of the greatest song-writing
partnership of the twentieth century, but as a martyr. Not everyone
was convinced. ‘Now, since his death, he’s become Martin Luther
Lennon.’ Paul McCartney had known Lennon too well ever to
mistake him for a saint. His joke, though, was also a tribute to King:
a man who had flown into the light of the dark black night. ‘Life’s
most persistent and urgent question is, “What are you doing for

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others?”’ McCartney, for all his dismissal of ‘goody goody stuff’,
was not oblivious to the tug of an appeal like this.
In 1985, asked to help relieve a devastating famine in
Ethiopia by taking part in the world’s largest-ever concert, he
readily agreed. Live Aid, staged simultaneously in London and
Philadelphia, the city of brotherly love, was broadcast to billions.
Musicians who had spent their careers variously bedding groupies
and snorting coke off trays balanced on the heads of dwarves
played sets in aid of the starving. As night fell over London, and the
concert in Wembley stadium reached its climax, lights picked out
McCartney at a piano. The number he sang, ‘Let It Be’, had been
the last single to be released by the Beatles while they were still
together. ‘When I find myself in times of trouble, Mother Mary
comes to me.’ Who was Mary? Perhaps, as McCartney himself
claimed, his mother; but perhaps, as Lennon had darkly suspected,
and many Catholics had come to believe, the Virgin. Whatever the
truth, no one that night could hear him. His microphone had cut
out. It was a performance perfectly appropriate to the paradoxes of
the age. [pages 488-497]

Thirty-sixth entry

Seven months before Live Aid, its organisers had recruited

many of the biggest acts in Britain and Ireland to a super-group:
Band Aid. ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas?’, a one-off charity
record, succeeded in raising so much money for famine relief that it
would end up the best-selling single in the history of the UK charts.
For all the peroxide, all the cross-dressing, all the bags of cocaine
smuggled into the recording studio, the project was one born of the
Christian past. Reporting on the sheer scale of the suffering in
Ethiopia, a BBC correspondent had described the scenes he was
witnessing as ‘biblical’; stirred into action, the organisers of Band

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Aid had embarked on a course of action that reached for its
ultimate inspiration to the examples of Paul and Basil. That charity
should be offered to the needy, and that a stranger in a foreign land
was no less a brother or sister than was a next-door neighbour, were
principles that had always been fundamental to the Christian
message. Concern for the victims of distant disasters—famines,
earthquakes, floods—was disproportionately strong in what had
once been Christendom. The overwhelming concentration of
international aid agencies there was no coincidence. Band Aid were
hardly the first to ask whether Africans knew that it was
Christmastime. In the nineteenth century, the same anxiety had
weighed heavily on Evangelicals. Missionaries had duly hacked their
way through uncharted jungles, campaigned against the slave trade,
and laboured with all their might to bring the Dark Continent into
the light of Christ. ‘A diffusive philanthropy is Christianity itself. It
requires perpetual propagation to attest its genuineness.’ Such was
the mission statement of the era’s most famous explorer, David
Livingstone. Band Aid—in their ambition to do good, if not in their
use of hair dye—were recognisably his heirs.
This was not, though, how their single was marketed.
Anything that smacked of white people telling Africans what to do
had become, by the 1980s, an embarrassment. Admiration even for
a missionary such as Livingstone, whose crusade against the Arab
slave trade had been unstintingly heroic, had come to pall. His
efforts to map the continent—far from serving the interests of
Africans, as he had trusted they would—had instead only opened
up its interior to conquest and exploitation. A decade after his death
from malaria in 1873, British adventurers had begun to expand deep
into the heart of Africa.
Other European powers had embarked on a similar
scramble. France had annexed much of north Africa, Belgium the
Congo, Germany Namibia. By the outbreak of the First World War,
almost the entire continent was under foreign rule. Only the
Ethiopians had succeeded in maintaining their independence.
Missionaries, struggling to continue with their great labour of
conversion, had found themselves stymied by the brute nature of
European power. How were Africans to believe talk of a god who
cared for the oppressed and the poor when the whites, the very
people who worshipped him, had seized their lands and plundered
them for diamonds, and ivory, and rubber? A colonial hierarchy in

148
which blacks were deemed inferior had seemed a peculiar and bitter
mockery of the missionaries’ insistence that Christ had died for all
of humanity. By the 1950s, when the tide of imperialism in Africa
had begun to ebb as fast it had originally flowed, it might have
seemed that Christianity was doomed to retreat as well, with
churches crumbling before the hunger of termites, and Bibles
melting into mildewed pulp. But that—in the event—was not what
had happened at all!
The ending of apartheid and the election in 1994 of
Mandela as South Africa’s first black president was one of the great
dramas of Christian history: a drama woven through with deliberate
echoes of the Gospels… The same faith that had inspired
Afrikaners to imagine themselves a chosen people was also, in the
long run, what had doomed their supremacy.
The pattern was a familiar one. Repeatedly, whether
crashing along the canals of Tenochtitlan, or settling the estuaries of
Massachusetts, or trekking deep into the Transvaal, the confidence
that had enabled Europeans to believe themselves superior to those
they were displacing was derived from Christianity. Repeatedly,
though, in the struggle to hold this arrogance to account, it was
Christianity that had provided the colonised and the enslaved with
their surest voice. The paradox was profound.
No other conquerors, carving out empires for themselves,
had done so as the servants of a man tortured to death on the
orders of a colonial official. No other conquerors, dismissing with
contempt the gods of other peoples, had installed in their place an
emblem of power so deeply ambivalent as to render problematic
the very notion of power. No other conquerors, exporting an
understanding of the divine peculiar to themselves, had so
successfully persuaded peoples around the globe that it possessed a
universal import. The collapse of apartheid had been merely the
aftershock of a far more convulsive earthquake. In 1989, even as de
Klerk was resolving to set Mandela free, the Soviet empire had
imploded. Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary: all had cast off the
chains of foreign rule. East Germany, a rump hived off by the
Soviets in the wake of the Second World War, had been absorbed
into a reunified—and thoroughly capitalist—Germany. The Soviet
Union itself had ceased to exist. Communism, weighed in the scales
of history, had been found wanting… That the paradise on earth
foretold by Marx had turned out instead to be closer to a hell only

149
emphasised the degree to which the true fulfilment of progress was
to be found elsewhere. With the rout of communism, it appeared to
many in the victorious West that it was their own political and
social order that constituted the ultimate, the unimprovable form of
government. Secularism; liberal democracy; the concept of human
rights: these were fit for the whole world to embrace. The
inheritance of the Enlightenment was for everyone: a possession for
all of mankind. It was promoted by the West, not because it was
Western, but because it was universal. The entire world could enjoy
its fruits. It was no more Christian than it was Hindu, or Confucian,
or Muslim. There was neither Asian nor European. Humanity was
embarked as one upon a common road. The end of history had
arrived. [pages 497-505]

Thirty-seventh entry

‘Why do they hate us?’

The president of the United States, in his address to a joint
session of Congress, knew that he was speaking for Americans
across the country when he asked this question. Nine days earlier,
on 11 September, an Islamic group named al-Qaeda had launched a
series of devastating attacks against targets in New York and
Washington. Planes had been hijacked and then crashed into the
World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Thousands had died.
George W. Bush, answering his own question, had no doubt as to
the motives of the terrorists. They hated America’s freedoms. Her
freedom of religion, her freedom of speech. Yet these were not
exclusively American. Rather, they were universal rights. They were
as much the patrimony of Muslims as of Christians, of Afghans as
of Americans. This was why the hatred felt for Bush and his
country across much of the Islamic world was based on
misunderstanding. ‘Like most Americans, I just can’t believe it

150
because I know how good we are.’ If American values were
universal, shared by humans across the planet, regardless of creed
or culture, then it stood to reason that Muslims shared them too.
Bush, sitting in judgement on the terrorists who had attacked his
country, condemned them not just for hijacking planes, but for
hijacking Islam itself. ‘We respect the faith. We honor its traditions.
Our enemy does not.’
It was in this spirit that the President, even as he ordered
the American war machine to inflict a terrible vengeance on al-
Qaeda, aimed to bring to the Muslim world freedoms that he
believed in all devoutness to be no less Islamic than they were
Western. First in Afghanistan, and then in Iraq, murderous
tyrannies were overthrown. Arriving in Baghdad in April 2003, US
forces pulled down statues of the deposed dictator. As they waited
to be given sweets and flowers by a grateful people, they waited as
well to deliver to Iraq the dues of freedom that Bush, a year earlier,
had described as applying fully to the entire Islamic world. ‘When it
comes to the common rights and needs of men and women, there is
no clash of civilizations.’
Except that sweets and flowers were notable by their
absence on the streets of Iraq. Instead, the Americans were greeted
with mortar attacks, and car bombs, and improvised explosive
devices. The country began to dissolve into anarchy. In Europe,
where opposition to the invasion of Iraq had been loud and vocal,
the insurgency was viewed with often ill-disguised satisfaction. Even
before 9/11, there were many who had felt that ‘the United States
had it coming’. By 2003, with US troops occupying two Muslim
countries, the accusation that Afghanistan and Iraq were the victims
of naked imperialism was becoming ever more insistent. What was
all the President’s fine talk of freedom if not a smokescreen? As to
what it might be hiding, the possibilities were multiple: oil,
geopolitics, the interests of Israel. Yet Bush, although a hard-boiled
businessman, was not just about the bottom line. He had never
thought to hide his truest inspiration. Asked while still a candidate
for the presidency to name his favourite thinker, he had answered
unhesitatingly: ‘Christ, because he changed my heart.’ Here,
unmistakably, was an Evangelical.
Bush, in his assumption that the concept of human rights
was a universal one, was perfectly sincere. Just as the Evangelicals
who fought to abolish the slave trade had done, he took for granted

151
that his own values—confirmed to him in his heart by the Spirit—
were values fit for all the world. He no more intended to bring Iraq
to Christianity than British Foreign Secretaries, back in the heyday
of the Royal Navy’s campaign against slavery, had aimed to convert
the Ottoman Empire. His ambition instead was to awaken Muslims
to the values within their own religion that would enable them to
see everything they had in common with America. ‘Islam, as
practised by the vast majority of people, is a peaceful religion, a
religion that respects others.’ Bush, asked to describe his own faith,
might well have couched it in similar terms. What bigger
compliment, then, could he possibly have paid to Muslims?
But Iraqis did not have their hearts opened to the similarity
of Islam to American values. Their country continued to burn. To
Bush’s critics, his talk of a war against evil appeared grotesquely
misapplied. If anyone had done evil, then it was surely the leader of
the world’s greatest military power, a man who had used all the
stupefying resources at his command to visit death and mayhem on
the powerless. In 2004 alone, US forces in Iraq variously bombed a
wedding party, flattened an entire city, and were photographed
torturing prisoners.
Most menacing of all was the United Nations. Established
in the aftermath of the Second World War, its delegates had
proclaimed a Universal Declaration of Human Rights. To be a
Muslim, though, was to know that humans did not have rights.
There was no natural law in Islam. There were only laws authored
by God. Muslim countries, by joining the United Nations, had
signed up to a host of commitments that derived, not from the
Qur’an or the Sunna, but from law codes devised in Christian
countries: that there should be equality between men and women;
equality between Muslims and non-Muslims; a ban on slavery; a ban
on offensive warfare. Such doctrines, al-Maqdisi sternly ruled, had
no place in Islam. To accept them was to become an apostate. Al-
Zarqawi, released from prison in 1999, did not forget al-Maqdisi’s
warnings. In 2003, launching his campaign in Iraq, he went for a
soft and telling target. On 19 August, a car bomb blew up the
United Nations headquarters in the country. The UN’s special
representative was crushed to death in his office. Twenty-two
others were also killed. Over a hundred were left maimed and
wounded. Shortly afterwards, the United Nations withdrew from
Iraq.

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 ‘Ours is a war not against a religion, not against the Muslim
faith.’ President Bush’s reassurance, offered before the invasion of
Iraq, was not one that al-Zarqawi was remotely prepared to accept.
What most people in the West meant by Islam and what scholars
like al-Maqdisi meant by it were not at all the same thing. What to
Bush appeared the markers of its compatibility with Western values
appeared to al-Maqdisi a fast-metastasising cancer… To al-Maqdisi,
the spectacle of Muslim governments legislating to uphold equality
between men and women, or between Islam and other religions,
was a monstrous blasphemy. The whole future of the world was at
stake. God’s final revelation, the last chance that humanity had of
redeeming itself from damnation, was directly threatened… His [al-
Maqdisi’s] incineration by a US jet strike in 2006 did not serve to
kill the hydra…
All that counted was the example of the Salaf. When al-
Zarqawi’s disciples smashed the statues of pagan gods, they were
following the example of Muhammad; when they proclaimed
themselves the shock troops of a would-be global empire, they were
following the example of the warriors who had humbled Heraclius;
when they beheaded enemy combatants, and reintroduced the jizya,
and took the women of defeated opponents as slaves, they were
doing nothing that the first Muslims had not gloried in. The only
road to an uncontaminated future was the road that led back to an
unspoilt past. Nothing of the Evangelicals, who had erupted into
the Muslim world with their gunboats and their talk of crimes
against humanity, was to remain. [pages 505-512]

Thirty-eight entry
Europeans had been able to take for granted the
impregnability of their own continent. Mass migration was
something that they brought to the lands of non-Europeans—not
the other way round.
Since the end of the Second World War, however, that had
changed. Attracted by higher living standards, large numbers of
immigrants from non-European countries had come to settle in
Western Europe. For decades, the pace and scale of immigration
into Germany had been carefully regulated; but now it seemed that
control was at risk of breaking down. Merkel, explaining the facts to
a sobbing teenager, knew full well the crisis that, even as she spoke,

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was building beyond Germany’s frontiers. All that summer,
thousands upon thousands of migrants and refugees from Muslim
countries had been moving through the Balkans. The spectacle
stirred deeply atavistic fears. In Hungary, there was talk of a new
Ottoman invasion. Even in Western Europe, in lands that had
never been conquered by Muslim armies, there were many who felt
a sense of unease. Dread that all the East might be on the move
reached back a long way. ‘The plain was dark with their marching
companies, and as far as eyes could strain in the mirk there
sprouted, like a foul fungus growth, all about the beleaguered city
great camps of tents, black or sombre red.’ So Tolkien, writing in
1946, had described the siege of Minas Tirith, bulwark of the free
lands of the West, by the armies of Sauron. The climax of The Lord
of the Rings palpably echoed the momentous events of 955: the
attack on Augsburg and the battle of the Lech… In 2003, a film
of The Lord of the Rings had brought Aragorn’s victory over the
snarling hordes of Mordor to millions who had never heard of the
battle of the Lech. Burnished and repackaged for the twenty-first
century, Otto’s defence of Christendom still possessed a spectral
glamour.
Its legacy, though, that summer of 2014, was shaded by
multiple ironies. Otto’s mantle was taken up not by the chancellor
of Germany, but by the prime minister of Hungary. Victor Orbán
had until recently been a self-avowed atheist; but this did not
prevent him from doubting—much as Otto might have done—
whether unbaptised migrants could ever truly be integrated. ‘This is
an important question, because Europe and European culture have
Christian roots.’ That September, ordering police to remove
refugees from trains and put up fences along Hungary’s southern
border, he warned that Europe’s soul was at stake.
Merkel, as she tracked the migrant crisis, had come to an
identical conclusion. Her response, however, was the opposite of
Orbán’s. Although pressed by ministers in her own ruling coalition
to close Germany’s borders, she refused. Huge crowds of Syrians,
Afghans and Iraqis began crossing into Bavaria. Soon, upwards of
ten thousand a day were pouring in. Crowds gathered at railway
stations to cheer them; football fans raised banners at matches to
proclaim them welcome. The scenes, the chancellor declared,
‘painted a picture of Germany which can make us proud of our
country’…

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 Himmler, a man whose loathing for Christianity had not
prevented him from admiring the martial feats of Christian
emperors, had hallowed Otto’s father as the supreme model of
Germanic heroism. It was darkly rumoured that he claimed to be
the Saxon king’s reincarnation. Hitler, although privately
contemptuous of Himmler’s more mystical leanings, had himself
been obsessed by the Holy Lance. A relic of the crucifixion had
been transmogrified into an emblem of Nazism. Seventy years on
from Hitler’s suicide, in a country still committed to doing penance
for his crimes, there had never been any prospect of Angela Merkel
riding to fight a new battle of the Lech. The truly, the only Christian
thing to do, faced by the floodtide of misery lapping at Europe’s
borders, was to abandon any lingering sense of the continent as
Christendom and open it up to the wretched of the earth.
Always, from the very beginnings of the Church, there had
been tension between Christ’s commandment to his followers that
they should go into the world and preach the good news to all
creation, and his parable of the Good Samaritan. Merkel was
familiar with both. Her father had been a pastor, her mother no less
devout. Her childhood home had been a hostel for people with
disabilities—people much like Reem Sahwil. ‘The daily message
was: Love your neighbour as yourself. Not just German people. God
loves everybody.’ For two millennia, Christians had been doing their
best to put these teachings into practice. Merkel, by providing
refuge to the victims of war in the Middle East, was doing nothing
that Gregory of Nyssa, sixteen centuries previously, had not
similarly done. Offer charity, he had urged his congregants, for the
spectacle of refugees living like animals was a reproach to every

155
Christian. ‘Their roof is the sky. For shelter they use porticos, alleys,
and the deserted corners of the town. They hide in the cracks of
walls like owls.’ Yet Merkel, when she sought to justify the opening
of her country’s borders—a volte-face all the more dramatic for
seeming so out of character—pointedly refused to frame it as a
gesture of Christian charity…
The West, over the duration of its global hegemony, had
become skilled in the art of repackaging Christian concepts for non-
Christian audiences. A doctrine such as that of human rights was
far likelier to be signed up to if its origins among the canon lawyers
of medieval Europe could be kept concealed. The insistence of
United Nations agencies on ‘the antiquity and broad acceptance of
the conception of the rights of man’ was a necessary precondition
for their claim to a global, rather than a merely Western,
jurisdiction. Secularism, in an identical manner, depended on the
care with which it covered its tracks. If it were to be embraced by
Jews, or Muslims, or Hindus as a neutral holder of the ring between
them and people of other faiths, then it could not afford to be seen
as what it was: a concept that had little meaning outside of a
Christian context. In Europe, the secular had for so long been
secularised that it was easy to forget its ultimate origins. [pages 516-
521]

Thirty-ninth entry
On 5 October 2017, allegations about what Harvey
Weinstein had been getting up to in his fourth-floor suite at the
Peninsula broke in the New York Times. An actress meeting him
there for what she had thought was a business breakfast had found
the producer wearing nothing but his bespoke bathrobe. Perhaps,
he had suggested, she could give him a massage? Or how about
watching him shower? Two assistants who had met with Weinstein
in his suite reported similar encounters.
Over the weeks and months that followed, further
allegations were levelled against him: harassment, assault, rape.
Among the more than eighty women going public with accusations
was Uma Thurman, the actor who had played Mia Wallace in Pulp
Fiction and become the movie’s pin-up. Meanwhile, where celebrity
forged a path, many other women followed. A campaign that urged
women to report incidents of harassment or assault under the
hashtag #MeToo actively sought to give a voice to the most

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marginalised and vulnerable of all: janitors, fruit-pickers, hotel
housekeepers. Already that year, the summons to a great moral
awakening, a call for men everywhere to reflect on their sins, and
repent them, had been much in the air. On 21 January, a million
women had marched through Washington, DC. Other, similar
demonstrations had been held around the world. The previous day,
a new president, Donald J. Trump, had been inaugurated in the
American capital. He was, to the organisers of the women’s
marches, the very embodiment of toxic masculinity: a swaggering
tycoon who had repeatedly been accused of sexual assault, who had
bragged of grabbing ‘pussy’, and who, during the recently
concluded presidential campaign, had paid hush money to a porn
star. Rather than make the marches about Trump, however, the
organisers had sought a loftier message: to sound a clarion call
against injustice, and discrimination, and oppression wherever it
might be found. ‘Yes, it’s about feminism. But it’s about more than
that. It’s about basic equality for all people.’

Above, a graffiti in a neighbourhood with

the words ‘no harassment’ in Arabic; below,
the myth of Daphne and Apollo (remember:
all Greco-Roman Gods were rapists).

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 The echo, of course, was of Martin Luther King.
Repeatedly, in the protests against misogyny that swept America
during the first year of Trump’s presidency, the name and example
of the great Baptist preacher were invoked. Yet Christianity, which
for King had been the fount of everything he ever campaigned for,
appeared to many who marched in 2017 part of the problem.
Evangelicals had voted in large numbers for Trump. Roiled by
issues that seemed to them not just unbiblical, but directly
antithetical to God’s purposes—abortion, gay marriage, transgender
rights—they had held their noses and backed a man who, pussy-
grabbing and porn stars notwithstanding, had unblushingly cast
himself as the standard-bearer for Christian values. Unsurprisingly,
then, hypocrisy had been added to bigotry on the charge sheet
levelled against them by progressives.
America, it seemed to many feminists, risked becoming a
misogynist theocracy. Three months after the Women’s March, a
television series made gripping drama out of this dread. The
Handmaid’s Tale was set in a country returned to a particularly
nightmarish vision of seventeenth century New England. Adapted
from a dystopian novel by the Canadian writer Margaret Atwood, it
provided female protestors against Trump with a striking new visual
language of protest. White bonnets and red cloaks were the uniform
worn by ‘handmaids’: women whose ability to reproduce had
rendered them, in a world crippled by widespread infertility, the
objects of legalised rape. Licence for the practice was provided by
an episode in the Bible. The parody of evangelicals was as dark as it
was savage. The Handmaid’s Tale—as all great dystopian fiction tends
to be—was less prophecy than satire. The TV series cast Trump’s
America as a society rent in two: between conservatives and liberals;
between reactionaries and progressives; between dark-souled
televangelists and noble-hearted foes of patriarchy.
Yet the divisions satirised by The Handmaid’s Tale were
in truth very ancient. They derived ultimately, not from the
specifics of American politics in the twenty-first century, but
from the very womb of Christianity. Blessed be the fruit. There
had always existed, in the hearts of the Christian people, a
tension between the demands of tradition and the claims of
progress, between the prerogatives of authority and the longing
for reformation, between the letter and the spirit of the law. The
twenty-first century marked, in that sense, no radical break with
what had gone before. That the great battles in America’s culture

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war were being fought between Christians and those who had
emancipated themselves from Christianity was a conceit that
both sides had an interest in promoting. It was no less of a myth
for that. In reality, Evangelicals and progressives were both
recognisably bred of the same matrix. If opponents of abortion
were the heirs of Macrina, who had toured the rubbish tips of
Cappadocia looking for abandoned infants to rescue, then those
who argued against them were likewise drawing on a deeply rooted
Christian supposition: that every woman’s body was her own, and
to be respected as such by every man. Supporters of gay marriage
were quite as influenced by the Church’s enthusiasm for
monogamous fidelity as those against it were by biblical
condemnations of men who slept with men. To install transgender
toilets might indeed seem an affront to the Lord God, who had
created male and female; but to refuse kindness to the
persecuted was to offend against the most fundamental
teachings of Christ. In a country as saturated in Christian
assumptions as the United States, there could be no escaping their
influence—even for those who imagined that they had. America’s
culture wars were less a war against Christianity than a civil war
between Christian factions.
In 1963, when Martin Luther King addressed hundreds of
thousands of civil rights protestors assembled in Washington, he
had aimed his speech at the country beyond the capital as well—at
an America that was still an unapologetically Christian nation. By
2017, things were different. Among the four co-chairs of the
Women’s March was a Muslim. Marching through Washington
were Sikhs, Buddhists, Jews. Huge numbers had no faith at all.
Even the Christians among the organisers flinched from attempting
to echo the prophetic voice of a Martin Luther King. Nevertheless,
their manifesto was no less based in theological presumptions than
that of the civil rights movement had been. Implicit in #MeToo
was the same call to sexual continence that had reverberated
throughout the Church’s history. Protestors who marched in the
red cloaks of handmaids were summoning men to exercise control
over their lusts just as the Puritans had done. Appetites that had
been hailed by enthusiasts for sexual liberation as Dionysiac stood
condemned once again as predatory and violent. The human body
was not an object, not a commodity to be used by the rich and
powerful as and when they pleased. Two thousand years of

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Christian sexual morality had resulted in men as well as women
widely taking this for granted. Had it not, then #MeToo would
have had no force.
The tracks of Christian theology, Nietzsche had
complained, wound everywhere. In the early twenty-first century,
they led—as they had done in earlier ages—in various and criss-
crossing directions. They led towards TV stations on which
televangelists preached the headship of men over women; and they
led as well towards gender studies departments, in which
Christianity was condemned for heteronormative marginalisation of
LGBTQIA+. Nietzsche had foretold it all. God might be dead, but
his shadow, immense and dreadful, continued to flicker even as his
corpse lay cold. Feminist academics were no less in thrall to it, no
less its acolytes, than were the most fire-breathing preachers. God
could not be eluded simply by refusing to believe in his existence.
Any condemnation of Christianity as patriarchal and repressive
derived from a framework of values that was itself utterly Christian.
‘The measure of a man’s compassion for the lowly and the
suffering comes to be the measure of the loftiness of his soul.’ It
was this, the epochal lesson taught by Jesus’ death on the cross, that
Nietzsche had always most despised about Christianity. Two
thousand years on, and the discovery made by Christ’s earliest
followers—that to be a victim might be a source of power—could
bring out millions onto the streets. Wealth and rank, in Trump’s
America, were not the only indices of status. So too were their
opposites. Against the priapic thrust of towers fitted with gold-
plated lifts, the organisers of the Women’s March sought to invoke
the authority of those who lay at the bottom of the pile. The last
were to be first, and the first were to be last. Yet how to measure
who ranked as the last and the first? As they had ever done, all the
multiple intersections of power, all the various dimensions of
stratification in society, served to marginalise some more than
others. Woman marching to demand equality with men always
had to remember—if they were wealthy, if they were educated, if
they were white—that there were many among them whose
oppression was greater by far than their own: ‘Black women,
indigenous women, poor women, immigrant women, disabled
women, Muslim women, lesbian, queer and trans women.’ The
disadvantaged too might boast their own hierarchy.
That it was the fate of rulers to be brought down from their
thrones, and the humble to be lifted up, was a reflection that had

160
always prompted anxious Christians to check their privilege. It had
inspired Paulinus to give away his wealth, and Francis to strip
himself naked before the Bishop of Assisi, and Elizabeth of
Hungary to toil in a hospital as a scullery maid. Similarly, a dread of
damnation, a yearning to be gathered into the ranks of the elect, a
desperation to be cleansed of original sin, had provided, from the
very moment the Pilgrim Fathers set sail, the surest and most fertile
seedbed for the ideals of the American people. Repeatedly, over
the course of their history, preachers had sought to awaken them
to a sense of their guilt, and to offer them salvation. Now, in the
twenty-first century, there were summons to a similar
awakening. When, in October 2017, the leaders of the Women’s
March organised a convention in Detroit, one panel in particular
found itself having to turn away delegates. ‘Confronting White
Womanhood’ offered white feminists the chance to acknowledge
their own entitlement, to confess their sins and to be granted
absolution. The opportunity was for the rich and the educated to
have their eyes opened; to stare the reality of injustice in the face;
truly to be awakened. Only through repentance was salvation to be
obtained. The conveners, though, were not merely addressing the
delegates in the conference hall. Their gaze, as the gaze of preachers
in America had always been, was fixed on the world beyond. Their
summons was to sinners everywhere. Their ambition was to
serve as a city on a hill.
Christianity, it seemed, had no need of actual Christians for
its assumptions still to flourish. Whether this was an illusion, or
whether the power held by victims over their victimisers would
survive the myth that had given it birth, only time would tell. As it
was, the retreat of Christian belief did not seem to imply any
necessary retreat of Christian values. Quite the contrary. Even in
Europe—a continent with churches far emptier than those in the
United States—the trace elements of Christianity continued to
infuse people’s morals and presumptions so utterly that many failed
even to detect their presence. Like dust particles so fine as to be
invisible to the naked eye, they were breathed in equally by
everyone: believers, atheists, and those who never paused so much
as to think about religion. Had it been otherwise, then no one would
ever have got woke. [pages 528-533]

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Fortieth entry
I have sought, in writing this book, to be as objective as
possible. Yet this, when dealing with a theme such as Christianity, is
not to be neutral. To claim, as I most certainly do, that I have
sought to evaluate fairly both the achievements and the crimes of
Christian civilisation is not to stand outside its moral frameworks,
but rather—as Nietzsche would have been quick to point out—to
stand within them.
The people who, in his famous fable, continue to venerate
the shadow of God are not just church-goers. All those in thrall to
Christian morality—even those who may be proud to array
themselves among God’s murderers—are included among their
number. Inevitably, to attempt the tracing of Christianity’s impact
on the world is to cover the rise and fall of empires, the actions of
bishops and kings, the arguments of theologians, the course of
revolutions, the planting of crosses around the world. It is, in
particular, to focus on the doings of men. Yet that hardly tells the
whole story. I have written much in this book about churches, and
monasteries, and universities; but these were never where the mass
of the Christian people were most influentially shaped. It was
always in the home that children were likeliest to absorb the
revolutionary teachings that, over the course of two thousand years,
have come to be so taken for granted as almost to seem human
nature.
‘There is nothing particular about man. He is but a part of
this world.’ Today, in the West, there are many who would agree
with Himmler that, for humanity to claim a special status for itself,
to imagine itself as somehow superior to the rest of creation, is an
unwarrantable conceit. Homo sapiens is just another species. To insist
otherwise is to cling to the shattered fragments of religious belief.50
Yet the implications of this view—which the Nazis, of course,
claimed as their sanction for genocide—remain unsettling for many.
Just as Nietzsche had foretold, freethinkers who mock the very idea
of a god as a dead thing, a sky fairy, an imaginary friend, still piously
hold to taboos and morals that derive from Christianity.

50 Editor’s note: What Savitri Devi calls anthropocentrism.

162
 Gudrun Himmler with her father, Heinrich Himmler, in Berlin in 1938.
‘Daddy has found it terribly difficult with the incredible amount of work,’
she wrote in her diary in 1945. ‘The Führer will not believe that the
soldiers will no longer fight. Still, perhaps everything will turn out fine.’

In 2002, in Amsterdam, the World Humanist Congress

affirmed ‘the worth, dignity and autonomy of the individual and the
right of every human being to the greatest possible freedom
compatible with the rights of others’. Yet this—despite humanists’
stated ambition to provide ‘an alternative to dogmatic religion’—
was nothing if not itself a statement of belief. Himmler, at any rate,
had understood what licence was opened up by the abandonment
of Christianity. The humanist assumption that atheism and
liberalism go together was just that: an assumption. Without the
biblical story that God had created humanity in his own image to
draw upon, the reverence of humanists for their own species risked
seeming mawkish and shallow. What basis—other than mere
sentimentality—was there to argue for it? Perhaps, as the humanist
manifesto declared, through ‘the application of the methods of
science’. Yet this was barely any less of a myth than Genesis. As in
the days of Darwin and Huxley, so in the twenty-first century, the
ambition of agnostics to translate values ‘into facts that can be
scientifically understood’ was a fantasy. It derived not from the
viability of such a project, but from medieval theology. It was not

163
truth that science offered moralists, but a mirror. Racists identified
it with racist values; liberals with liberal values. The primary dogma
of humanism—‘that morality is an intrinsic part of human nature
based on understanding and a concern for others’—found no more
corroboration in science than did the dogma of the Nazis that
anyone not fit for life should be exterminated. The wellspring of
humanist values lay not in reason, not in evidence-based thinking,
but in history.
When, in an astonishing breakthrough, collagen was
extracted recently from the remains of one tyrannosaur fossil, its
amino acid sequences turned out to bear an unmistakable
resemblance to those of a chicken. The more the evidence is
studied, the hazier the dividing line between birds and dinosaurs has
become. The same, mutatis mutandis, might be said of the dividing
line between agnostics and Christians. On 16 July 2018, one of the
world’s best-known scientists, a man as celebrated for his polemics
against religion as for his writings on evolutionary biology, sat
listening to the bells of an English cathedral. ‘So much nicer than
the aggressive-sounding “Allahu Akhbar”,’ Richard Dawkins
tweeted. ‘Or is that just my cultural upbringing?’ The question was a
perfectly appropriate one for an admirer of Darwin to ponder. It is
no surprise, since humans, just like any other biological organism,
are products of evolution, that its workings should be evident in
their assumptions, beliefs and cultures. A preference for church
bells over the sound of Muslims praising God does not just emerge
by magic. Dawkins—agnostic, secularist and humanist that he is—
absolutely has the instincts of someone brought up in a Christian
civilisation.
Today, as the flood tide of Western power and influence
ebbs, the illusions of European and American liberals risk being left
stranded. Much that they have sought to cast as universal stands
exposed as never having been anything of the kind. Agnosticism—
as Huxley, the man who coined the word, readily acknowledged—
ranks as ‘that conviction of the supremacy of private judgment
(indeed, of the impossibility of escaping it) which is the foundation
of the Protestant Reformation’. Secularism owes its existence to the
medieval papacy. Humanism derives ultimately from claims made in
the Bible: that humans are made in God’s image; that his Son died
equally for everyone; that there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor
free, male nor female. Repeatedly, like a great earthquake,

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Christianity has sent reverberations across the world. First there was
the primal revolution: the revolution preached by Saint Paul. Then
there came the aftershocks: the revolution in the eleventh century
that set Latin Christendom upon its momentous course; the
revolution commemorated as the Reformation; the revolution that
killed God. All bore an identical stamp: the aspiration to enfold
within its embrace every other possible way of seeing the world; the
claim to a universalism that was culturally highly specific. That
human beings have rights; that they are born equal; that they are
owed sustenance, and shelter, and refuge from persecution: these
were never self-evident truths.
The Nazis, certainly, knew as much—which is why, in
today’s demonology, they retain their starring role. Communist
dictators may have been no less murderous than fascist ones; but
they—because communism was the expression of a concern for the
oppressed masses—rarely seem as diabolical to people today. The
measure of how Christian we as a society remain is that mass
murder precipitated by racism tends to be seen as vastly more
abhorrent than mass murder precipitated by an ambition to usher in
a classless paradise. Liberals may not believe in hell; but they still
believe in evil. The fear of it puts them in its shade no less than it
ever did Gregory the Great. Just as he lived in dread of Satan, so do
we of Hitler’s ghost. Behind the readiness to use ‘fascist’ as an insult
there lurks a numbing fear: of what might happen should it cease to
be taken as an insult. If secular humanism derives not from reason
or from science, but from the distinctive course of Christianity’s
evolution—a course that, in the opinion of growing numbers in
Europe and America, has left God dead—then how are its values
anything more than the shadow of a corpse? What are the
foundations of its morality, if not a myth?
A myth, though, is not a lie. At its most profound—as
Tolkien, that devout Catholic, always argued—a myth can be true.
To be a Christian is to believe that God became man and suffered a
death as terrible as any mortal has ever suffered. This is why the
cross, that ancient implement of torture, remains what it has always
been: the fitting symbol of the Christian revolution. It is the
audacity of it—the audacity of finding in a twisted and defeated
corpse the glory of the creator of the universe—that serves to
explain, more surely than anything else, the sheer strangeness of
Christianity, and of the civilisation to which it gave birth. Today, the

165
power of this strangeness remains as alive as it has ever been. It is
manifest in the great surge of conversions that has swept Africa and
Asia over the past century; in the conviction of millions upon
millions that the breath of the Spirit, like a living fire, still blows
upon the world; and, in Europe and North America, in the
assumptions of many more millions who would never think to
describe themselves as Christian. All are heirs to the same
revolution: a revolution that has, at its molten heart, the image of a
god dead on a cross…
Crucifixion was not merely a punishment. It was a means
to achieving dominance: a dominance felt as a dread in the guts of
the subdued. Terror of power was the index of power. That was
how it had always been, and always would be. It was the way of the
world. For two thousand years, though, Christians have disputed
this. Many of them, over the course of this time, have themselves
become agents of terror. They have put the weak in their shadow;
they have brought suffering, and persecution, and slavery in their
wake. Yet the standards by which they stand condemned for this
are themselves Christian; nor, even if churches across the West
continue to empty, does it seem likely that these standards will
quickly change. ‘God chose the weak things of the world to shame
the strong.’ This is the myth that we in the West still persist in
clinging to.

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 The Appian Way
by Editor
Basically, Holland is saying that Christian morality is the
seedbed that makes today’s secular West what it is. I would add
that, for contemporary racialists, the hardest pill to swallow is that
their movement has failed because of Christianity. And it will
continue to fail unless they become true apostates, not only
apostates from Christian dogma but also of the axiological side of
Christianity: the so-called secular side. (After all, ‘secular’ is just the
tricky term St Augustine chose for his theological system, used even
in our modern world, when in fact the ‘secular’ and the ‘religious’
have always been two sides of the same cultural coin.) Any racialist
movement was doomed from the start, is doomed and will be
doomed to failure unless it is understood that Christianity, or more
specifically Christian morality, has always been the Devil for the
white man. This includes the morality of today’s atheists whose
worldview we here call Neo-Christian.
Only by telling us the story of the white race as it really
happened in the Greco-Roman world (and here we can think of
some essays from The Fair Race), together with elementary historical
facts such as the non-existence of Jesus that Richard Carrier talks
about, and how the New Testament was authored by Jews as David
Skrbina believes, will it be possible to modify the collective
unconscious of the white man—especially if we add to that a few
pages from Karlheinz Deschner’s Criminal History of Christianity and
the history of the Holocaust committed by the Allies, so well
described in Tom Goodrich’s Hellstorm. The psychohistorical work
of Holland, who has lost faith in traditional Christianity is also
pivotal even if, as a typical British liberal he is our ideological
enemy. But let’s use him as a useful idiot…
Holland hit the nail on the head when he said that National
Socialism has been the most radical movement since Constantine,

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especially because it rebels against St Paul’s idea that there is no
difference between Jews and Greeks (transformed today in the
religious belief that there is no difference between blacks and
whites): the original mental virus that caused the inversion of
values. Holland also points out that the National Socialists
repudiated the very essence of the emblem of the Cross: that a
crucified victim is more morally worthy than the crucifying
Romans. This idea persists in our times during mass hysteria
phenomena such as the Black Lives Matter (BLM) riots of 2020
surrounding the death of George Floyd when countless whites,
even outside the US, bent the knee before primitive Negroes!
Holland has said in several interviews that the central
emblem of Western civilisation, Christ on the Cross (now
downtrodden negroes on ‘crosses’) provides a moral framework for
understanding the Woke phenomenon. Before reading Dominion, in
‘On empowering carcass-eating birds’ in my book Daybreak I had
already said that empowering transgender people was a kind of neo-
Franciscanism, in reference to St Francis of Assisi (‘let's love and
kiss the new leper’), and quoted the biblical passage that the last
shall be first and the first last. Analogously, speaking about whites
bending the knee after the BLM riots, Holland has said that this
self-debasement ultimately goes back to the Gospel narrative of the
Passion, ‘to that very, very primal image of a man tortured to death
by an oppressive state apparatus: Jesus on the cross.’ Not only at
the end of Dominion but in his lectures this London historian has
also said that a thoroughgoing rejection of Christianity would allow
us to return to the ways of the blond beast. (As axiological enemies
of Holland, we would add that the first thing this beast would do
will be to drive the millions non-whites out of their lands and
punish the recalcitrant as the Romans did in the Appian Way.) In a
home interview with a conservative Australian, Holland added:
The modern who has more profoundly and
unsettlingly understood just how radical that idea is—how
radical the idea that the Cross, of all things, should become the
emblem of the new civilisation—, was a man who was not just
an atheist but a radical hostile, anti-Christian atheist: Friedrich
Nietzsche. Nietzsche said: this is a repellent thing. Nietzsche
identified with the power and the glory and the beauty of
classical civilisation; and he thought that Christianity,
notoriously, was a religion for slaves. And he saw in the

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 emblem of Christ nailed to the Cross a kind of disgusting
subversion of the ideals of the classical world: a privileging of
those who properly should be ground beneath the heels of the
mighty. And he saw it as a kind of sickness that then, it kind of
infected the blond beast as he called it: that the primordial
figure of the warrior gets corrupted and turned into a monk, a
monkish figure who is sick with poverty and sympathy for the
poor and the oppressed…
Fascism, I think, was the most radical revolutionary
movement that Europe has seen since the age of Constantine
because unlike the French Revolution, unlike and the Russian
Revolution, it doesn’t even target institutional Christianity: it
targets the moral-ethical fundamentals of Christianity. The
French Revolution, the Russian Revolution are still preaching
that idea that the victim should be raised up from the dust and
that the oppressor should be humbled into the dust; it’s still
preaching the idea that the first should be last and the last
should be first just as Christ has done.
The Nazis do not buy into that.
In the post-WWII world westerners culminated the
inversion of healthy values that started with Constantine. They
enshrined the privileges of the unprivileged and the universality of
all human beings—Orc immigrants included—because they now
live in the shadow of what enshrined the opposite: Hitlerism; and,
given their Christian programming, that scares them. As Holland
said at the end of another interview, ‘to cling to the idea that, say,
racism is the ultimate sin is still for deeply Christian reasons. It's
possible to imagine a different world in which the strong are
powerful and in which the world is divided into the civilised and the
barbarians because that's what the Ancient World was like, and
that's what the Nazis enshrined. It's perfectly possible. The fact that
we regard them as abhorrent I think is testimony of how Christian
we remain.’
What Angela Merkel did, opening the doors to two million
refugees in her anti-Nazi Germany, is ultimately an extreme form of
following the parable of the Good Samaritan. Always keep in mind
that Jesus didn’t exist but that some Jewish rabbis, the mythmakers,
wrote the New Testament. No racialist movement that fails to see
this can succeed because despite their rabid anti-Semitism racialists
continue to, ultimately, obey the Jews who wrote the NT. They are Jew-

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obeyers. They all live, atheists included, under the moral sky
bequeathed to us by the mighty archetype of ‘God on the Cross.’
And outside racist forums, the attempt to make not only the
dispossessed blacks but poor transexual people the first, and the
healthy white man the last, is but the final metastasis of an inversion
that began to take root in our collective unconscious as early as the
4th century of the Common Era.
For decades, in my soliloquies I have often said to myself:
‘A fish cannot criticise water,’ i.e. we live in a matrix. Without
knowing it or recognising it, secular humanists have been swimming
in Christian waters since what misleadingly they call the age of
enlightenment (actually a ‘Dark Enlightenment,’ as some right-wing
intellectuals have pointed out). Ultimately this whole issue of
‘human rights’ is nothing more than a transposition to the legal
plane of the Pauline ideas that there is no difference between Jew
and Greek, woman and man. In the Athenian democracy only the
native males of Attica had the right to vote. Neither slaves nor
women nor mudblood foreigners could do so. The assumption that
we owe modern democracy to the Greeks is false: we owe it to
Christian mandates. Furthermore, modern westerners commit what
I call, again in my soliloquies, the psychological fallacy of ontological
extension. They believe that all cultures share their humanitarian
values when not even the ancient Greeks, the Romans or
Norsemen did; let alone billions of contemporary Muslims, Chinese
or Hindus. In Holland’s words, ‘the conceit of the West is that it
has transcended Christianity to become purely universal; purely
global, and therefore it can market itself in those terms. But its
values, its assumptions, its ethics remain palpably bred of the
marrow of Christianity.’
The term catholic derives from the Greek, katholikos. If we
translate ‘universal human rights’ into the Greek of the first
centuries of our era, we would be talking about ‘catholic human
rights’ insofar as catholic means precisely universal in the sense of no
longer making distinctions between Jew and Greek, woman and
man, slave and free man: all are now equal in the eyes of a Semitic
god. Human rights are catholic in this universal sense. Hitler
targeted the idea there exists such a thing as universal human
dignity, as well as the idea that the first should be last. From his
viewpoint, our viewpoint, and I am talking to those who will read
Savitri Devi’s book or Day of Wrath and On Exterminationism (all

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listed on page 3), there is no such a thing as rights. Only the moral
duty to dispose of the obsolete versions of Homo sapiens. This is the
ultimate repudiation of the Christian heritage, and the horror that
most westerners feel at the figures of Hitler and Himmler is nothing
other than their continued enslavement to the archetype of the Jew
on the Cross which they are still unable to exorcize from their
psyches, even if this symbolic ‘Jew’ now takes other forms.
If we see Christianity and the French Revolution’s human
rights as two sides of the same axiological coin, let us venture to say
that the perfect symbol of our counter-revolution would be for
thousands of blonde beasts starting to wear T-shirts emblazoned
with Himmler’s face while burning churches, crucifying all those
who tried to destroy their race and wiping their asses with the
remains of the pages of the now destroyed Bibles all over the West,
but especially in the US. And the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, which
symbolises the historic inauguration of Neo-Christianity, must be
razed to the ground as well.

As Nietzsche said, Umwertung aller Werte!

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172
 Law against Christianity 51
by Friedrich Nietzsche
Given on the Day of Salvation, on the first day of the year
one (30 September 1888, according to the false calculation of time).
War to the death against vice: the vice is Christianity.
First article.—Every type of anti-nature is a vice. The priest is
the most vicious type of person: he teaches anti-nature. Priests are
not to be reasoned with, they are to be locked up.
Second article.—Any participation in church services is an
attack on public morality. One should be harsher with Protestants
than with Catholics, harsher with liberal Protestants than with
orthodox ones. The criminality of being Christian increases with
your proximity to science. The criminal of criminals is consequently
the philosopher.
Third article.—The execrable location where Christianity
brooded over its basilisk eggs should be razed to the ground and,
being the depraved spot on earth, it should be the horror of all
posterity. Poisonous snakes should be bred on top of it.
Fourth article.—The preacher of chastity is a public
incitement to anti-nature. Contempt for sexuality, making it unclean
with the concept of ‘uncleanliness’, these are the real sins against
the holy spirit of life.
Fifth article.—Eating at the same table as a priest ostracizes:
you are excommunicated from honest society. The priest is our
Chandala, —he should be ostracized, starved, driven into every type
of desert.
Sixth article.—The ‘holy’ history should be called by the
name it deserves, the cursed history; the words ‘God’, ‘saviour’,

51 Nietzsche’s ‘Law Against Christianity’ is a piece that has

been eliminated from numerous editions of The Anti-Christ: A Curse on
Christianity.

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‘redeemer’, ‘saint’ should be used as terms of abuse, to signify
criminals.
Seventh article.—The rest follows from this.

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