My summer with Gibbon It's like being cornered by an oddball at a party

Does Decline and Fall hold up beyond these soundbites? Today’s historians tend to use it, if they use it at all, as a cheap punchbag. Perhaps the Antonines weren’t so great after all; perhaps the Battle of Tours wasn’t really a turning point in history. When such opinions are articulated, Gibbon is swiftly conscripted. There is scarcely a history of Byzantium in print that fails to set itself against Gibbon’s portrayal of the medieval Greeks holding “in their lifeless hands the riches of their fathers, without inheriting the spirit which had created and improved that sacred patrimony”. Bold attempts in recent years at reviving an unqualified Gibbonism have generally been poorly received.

Still, there are always intellectual continuities to be found. Peter Brown, perhaps the greatest living historian, is often seen as one of the great vanquishers of Gibbon from the study of Late Antiquity, rescuing the culture and characters from that “dark” historical period from Gibbon’s scorn. But the difference between them is more one of moral or aesthetic evaluation than substance. When Gibbon writes that “in the long period of twelve hundred years, which elapsed between the reign of Constantine and the reformation of Luther, the worship of saints and relics corrupted the pure and perfect simplicity of the Christian model”, Brown does not really disagree that such a shift did occur; he simply rejects that it was a “corruption”. What the Enlightened Gibbon saw as “ignorance” and “superstition” becomes in Brown’s hands, and in our more benignly secular age, “vibrancy” and “spirituality”.

Gibbon never denied that he infused his history with moral judgement. What mattered to him was that his moral judgements were products of his own original reflection, rather than pro forma expressions of Christian piety. Like many who we would now regard as popular historians, he had to cast off the straitjacket of academia. His 14 months as a student at Oxford were “the most idle and unprofitable of my whole life”: the university, he wrote in his Memoirs, was too “steeped in port and prejudice” to sustain serious, inventive scholarship. Oxford and Cambridge had been founded “in a dark age of false and barbarous science”; they could never escape their Gothic past, and were therefore fetters on the Enlightened mind. Both in his Memoirs and in Decline and Fall, Gibbon endorsed Adam Smith’s suggestion that university education would be improved if, instead of receiving a fixed stipend, lecturers were tipped by their students. The salaried professor, after all, made a mockery of the pursuit of learning for its own sake: Aristotle or Plato would never have “degenerated from the example of Socrates as to exchange knowledge for gold”. Perhaps it was not just his fervent anticlericalism, therefore, that so ruffled academic feathers.

His religious readers were especially irked by the infamous 15th and 16th chapters of Decline and Fall, which chart the growth of Christianity from an obscure Judaean sect to the state religion of the Roman Empire. It was not just that Gibbon, as is well known, drew a connecting line between the rise of Christianity and the decline of Rome; he also attracted controversy for his insistence that the Roman persecution of the Christians had been grossly exaggerated by Christian apologists. This was, he claimed, a “very natural mistake” of projection: “the ecclesiastical writers of the 4th or 5th centuries ascribed to the magistrates of Rome the same degree of implacable and unrelenting zeal which filled their own breasts against the heretics or the idolaters of their own times”.

This is but one of those passages from Gibbon which feel like they could have been written by Richard Dawkins. His writing drips with disdain for the “long night of superstition” that the church cast over Dark-Age Europe. Figures such as Constantine and St Augustine are treated with some ambivalence and distaste, while men such as Julian the Apostate — Constantine’s nephew, who tried in vain to restore the pagan religion — come out looking rather impressive. Such was the chilling effect of Christianity on the Western mind, according to Gibbon, that even the Renaissance, when it finally arrived, was in its earliest inklings something of a flaccid disappointment. Christianity also bred incessant metaphysical squabbling, which, as well as being intellectually stifling, was practically harmful. While the church was “distracted by the Nestorian and Monophysite sects”, for example, “Mahomet, with the sword in one hand and the Koran in the other, erected his throne on the ruins of Christianity and of Rome”.

What animates all of Decline and Fall is Gibbon’s deep love for learning. Time and again he criticises his historical subjects for abandoning intellectual pursuits for other, less worthy things, like luxury, superstition, and war. “I am not insensible of the benefits of elegant luxury”, he says: but would it not have been better if print, rather than silk, had traversed the trade routes from China to medieval Europe? He likewise castigates the Crusaders for pillaging relics from Constantinople instead of priceless Greek manuscripts. Finally, as he approaches the final scene of his historical narrative, the fall of Constantinople to the Turks, he laments that the invention of gunpowder was able to spread so much more rapidly than knowledge. “If we contrast the rapid progress of this mischievous discovery with the slow and laborious advances of reason, science, and the arts of peace, a philosopher, according to his temper, will laugh or weep at the folly of mankind.”

Gibbon was more a laugher than a weeper. In devoting so much of his life to Decline and Fall, he wrote in his Memoirs, “my own amusement is my motive, and will be my reward”. History is “little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind”, and can therefore only be met with a wry and ironic smile; and since the decline and fall of the Roman Empire was “the greatest, perhaps, and most awful scene in the history of mankind”, it warranted the wriest and most ironical smile of all. There is, however, still room in his narrative for sincere moral feeling. At one point, for example, he describes the beheading of the Goth chieftain Radagaisus by the Romans in 406, an act of “cool and deliberate cruelty”. He adds in a footnote — the footnotes are often where the real gems are buried — that the contemporary Christian historian Orosius was “piously inhuman” for celebrating Radagaisus’s execution “without a symptom of compassion”. “The bloody actor is less detestable than the cool, unfeeling historian.” Gibbon’s demeanour was detached and ironic, but never “unfeeling”.

There are plenty of flowery and over-elaborated reasons for why you should read Gibbon. I do not wish to indulge in them. You should not read him because he holds the key to some eternal truth, nor because he tells us something vital about our own times — though well he might. You should not read him if you want a reliable historical account of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire; Gibbon, I hope, would be gratified by how far historical science has advanced in the 230 years since his death, and how much his own work has been improved upon. Rather, you should read Decline and Fall, all 4,000 pages of it, because it’s good fun. It is the historiographical equivalent of that other great artefact of 18th-century English wit, Tristram Shandy: both books, loquacious and digressive, are like being cornered by an oddball at a party who, it turns out, is witty and entertaining enough to get away with it. “Who can refute a sneer?” William Paley famously said of Decline and Fall: but there are worse expressions for the historian to wear than a sneer, and worse ways to spend the summer than in the company of Edward Gibbon.

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Samuel Rubinstein is a writer and historian.

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