The longer I spent immersed in the study of classical antiquity, the more alien and unsettling I came to find 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 I came to find shocking, but the lack of a sense that the poor or the weak might have any intrinsic value. As such, the founding conviction of the Enlightenment \u201d\u201c that it owed nothing to the faith into which most of its greatest figures had been born \u201d\u201c increasingly came to seem to me unsustainable.<\/p>\n
\u201cEvery sensible man,\u201d\u009d Voltaire wrote, \u201cevery honourable man, must hold the Christian sect in horror.\u201d\u009d Rather than acknowledge that his ethical principles might owe anything to Christianity, he preferred to derive them from a range of other sources \u201d\u201c not just classical literature, but Chinese philosophy and his own powers of reason. Yet Voltaire, in his concern for the weak and \u00c2\u00adoppressed, was marked more enduringly by the stamp of biblical ethics than he cared to admit. His defiance of the Christian God, in a paradox that was certainly not unique to him, drew on motivations that were, in part at least, recognisably Christian.<\/p>\n