Tom Holland: preference

Transcript context

…What is your implicit theology? I remember going to San Francisco. My . . . she wasn’t my wife then. She became my wife. She got a one-year place at Stanford. I was very, very upset about this, that she’d gone. I went out, and it was my first time to America. I went to San Francisco. I was so excited to go to San Francisco because, for me, it was the city of flower power and hippies and everything. I went to Haight-Ashbury and went toward all the hippie bookshops and got a whole load of books on the gnostics there and read them up. I was very into all that kind of stuff, but I now absolutely repudiate that. I don’t think that the gnostics were hippies, were in any way progressive. I think that they were deep, dark pessimists. What I like in Christianity, actually, is the message of hope that it offers, the message of salvation, and the message that matter is not evil, that our human bodies and the world around us are not creations of some malign demiurge, but are created by God and therefore are good. I find that a much more positive message than the gnosticism that I found so appealing when I was 21 and very much in the throes of love, which may have confused and blurred my thought patterns. What did you learn about modernity by translating Herodotus, which I believe was one page a day?…

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