YouSaid · the spoken record

Tom Holland

lines on the record: 60
first: 2023-03-22
most recent: 2023-03-22
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“there should be no discrimination between people of different cultural and ethnic backgrounds based on gender, based on class, remains pretty foundational for liberalism to this day. And I think that liberalism in so many ways is a kind of secularized rendering of that extraordinary verse. I mean, I think it's almost impossible to avoid metaphor when thinking about what the relationship is to these biblical texts, these biblical verses, to the present day. And I variously compared Paul in particular in his letters and his writings to rather unoriginally to an acorn from which a mighty oak grows. But I think actually more appropriately to a depth charge released beneath the vast fabric of classical civilization and the ripples, the reverberations of it are faint to begin with. And then they become louder and louder and more and more disruptive.”
2023-03-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Tom Holland on History, Christianity, and the Value of the Countryside · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that that is a treacherous question to ask because it implies that there would be a coherent line of dissent from any one text that can be traced like that. I think that the line of dissent that leads from the Gospels and from the New Testament and from the Bible and indeed from the entire corpus of early Christian texts to modern liberalism is too confused, too much of a swirl of influences for us to trace it back to a particular text. If I had to choose any one book from the Bible, it wouldn't be a gospel. It would probably be Paul's letter to the Galatians, because Paul's letter to the Galatians contains the famous verse that there is no dual Greek, there is no slave or free, there is no man or woman in Christ, and in a way that text even if you kind of bracket out and remove the in Christ from it, that idea that properly”
2023-03-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Tom Holland on History, Christianity, and the Value of the Countryside · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so when the first millennium arrives a year one thousand, the church is not encouraging people to feel kind of apocalyptic anxieties, but I think they indisputably do. And I think actually, ironically, the fact that the church emerges from this millennial period and that Christ hasn't come, the reign of Antichrist hasn't come, the horrors and the extraordinary wars and plagues and terrors that were seen by John in the book of Revelation have not been manifested, opens up for reformers in the 11th century to an idea that the Christian people can be cleansed, can be reformed, can be brought closer to God, and that precipitates what I think is the first great revolutionary moment in European and therefore Western history, what's called the papal revolution. And it's that revolution, I think, that stands at the fountain head.”
2023-03-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Tom Holland on History, Christianity, and the Value of the Countryside · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Thing about the book of Revelation is that it was recognized by Christians themselves in antiquity as a highly dangerous book, so it wasn't included in the canon of the New Testament in the Orthodox Church, so in the realms of the Byzantine Empire until the 10th century. They were nervous of it. And although it was included in the canon of the New Testament in the Latin Church much earlier, again, you look at the church fathers in the Latin Church, and again, they're very, very nervous of it. And the archetypal, the greatest of the Latin church fathers, Saint Augustine, writing in the late 4th and early 5th century, he is very, very anxious that Christians might read the book of Revelation and interpret it too literally. And so there's talk about, you know, a thousand years in the book of Revelation as a key span of time. And Augustine is absolutely definite that this is to be seen as a kind of abstraction.”
2023-03-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Tom Holland on History, Christianity, and the Value of the Countryside · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not against Muslim enemies but against Christians themselves in the 13th century. And I think it's difficult in that context to look at the Catholic Church of the Middle Ages as wholly a benign institution.”
2023-03-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Tom Holland on History, Christianity, and the Value of the Countryside · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I don't think so. I found when I came to writing about Christianity and dominion is a study of the entire sweep of Christianity. I mean, it's kind of insanely ambitious book that it was a kind of privileged for me to immerse myself in all these different periods and read the great Christian writers and thinkers and polemicists of different periods. And I found that I was fascinated in almost all of them. And there was very rarely a chapter that I wrote where I didn't think I wish I could stay here and continue to read about it. And absolutely, writing about the medieval church, I found I did find it very, very powerful. But equally getting to the Reformation, I felt the power of the Protestant reformers as well. And actually, we're recording this in London is the afternoon. This morning I spent recording three episodes of the rest's history on what's erroneously called the Cathars were the objects of perhaps the most brutal and bloody of all the crusades waged.”
2023-03-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Tom Holland on History, Christianity, and the Value of the Countryside · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A bit like studying a butterfly by sticking a pin through it. And too objective, too academic, too rationalist an approach can risk alienating you from the very perspectives that you're trying to understand. And I think that that was something I realized now from the distance of time from when I was writing the vampire books. That's what I was kind of exploring in those books and have continued to explore, I think.”
2023-03-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Tom Holland on History, Christianity, and the Value of the Countryside · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Various periods of history in which famous people from history were vampires. And I began to realize I wasn't really interested in writing novels. I wasn't ultimately interested in writing vampire stories. I wanted to write about history. But the link, I think, with Christianity is that what interested me in writing about the vampire novels and what has interested me in writing all the various volumes of history in various periods of time that I've done since is a fascination with how people in different ages understood things that us today might seem far-fetched, implausible, impossible. So essentially how they relate to the dimension of the supernatural. And I think it's a real problem for anyone in the 21st century trying to understand the past is that perhaps two academic approach to the study of what say people in Rome or early medieval Europe or whatever thought about the divine is that it”
2023-03-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Tom Holland on History, Christianity, and the Value of the Countryside · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“By the Byrons, the Byrons had fought on the side of the king in the Civil War, had been kind of admirals and ne'er do wells, and Byron inherited this title. And I went to this abbey and was told stories about how Byron and his friends would dress up as monks. Byron had a drinking cup made out of a skull, and he and all the lads would, you know, do very ungodly things. And this seemed to me the height of glamour and sophistication. And to my innocent church-going self, Byron became a kind of model of swagger and glamour as he was for people throughout the 19th century and for many people still is. And so I became fascinated by Byron. I initially wanted to do a doctorate on him. But then I gave that up because I decided that he was just too fascinating, too charismatic. And basically too hostile to the academic, I think, that he didn't deserve an academic treatment. And so instead I wrote a novel in which he was a vampire. And so that set me on the course of writing. So I wrote three novels.”
2023-03-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Tom Holland on History, Christianity, and the Value of the Countryside · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's a very, very good question because I'd never thought of the conjunction, although now you mention it, so I was raised by my mother in the Church of England, is a regular churchgoer. And so I went to church with her. And so that was very much part of my upbringing. But at the same time, my mother's elder brother, my uncle David, he was an extraordinary man who had during the Second World War he'd been posted as a very young man out to India. He'd fallen in love with India throughout the fifties he worked as a publisher in Pakistan. And then while he was out there, he decided that actually he wanted to be an actor. So he came back to England. He got roles, he got a role in Doctor Who as a homicidal Tibetan monk. He was not a churchgoer, it would be fair to say. And he took me to Newstead Abbey as a very impressionable boy. And Newstead Abbey is the home of Lord Byron. And it was an abbey that had been closed down in the Reformation, bought.”
2023-03-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Tom Holland on History, Christianity, and the Value of the Countryside · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source