(Thomas Cole, The Course of Empire — Destruction)
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The year 1776 was an eventful one. The August issue of the Gentleman’s Magazine duly carried a curious document from across the ocean called “The Declaration of American Independence”, before proceeding to a more serious matter: a review of a recent work of history by one Edward Gibbon. Praising Gibbon’s learning and style, the critic was left aghast by his “venom” and espousal of “all the calumnies and reproaches against the Christian faith”. Not all reactions to Gibbon’s History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire were quite so harsh. As one poet declared in 1781:
Science for thee a NEWTON raised;
For thy renown a SHAKESPEARE blazed,
Lord of the drama’s sphere!
In different fields to equal praise
See History now thy GIBBON raise
To shine without a peer!
Nowadays, Decline and Fall suffers the misfortune of all great books: to be far more cited than read. “Do Byzantinists still read Gibbon?” the historian Mark Whittow once asked; “the straightforward answer is no”. Those who do still read Gibbon tend not to be specialists in his primary field of study, which has since adopted the label of Late Antiquity. Rather, Gibbon’s readers are Gibbon-scholars, their hands held through all six volumes of Decline and Fall by the late J.G.A. Pocock’s equally lengthy explication of them.
But few writers in the English language are so quotable. It is impossible to read anything about the Antonine Emperors without hearing that their reigns constituted the “period in the history of the world during which the condition of the human race was most happy and prosperous”, or even to glance at the Wikipedia page for the Battle of Tours without relishing the counterfactual that, had the Muslims won, “perhaps the interpretation of the Koran would now be taught in the schools of Oxford, and her pulpits might demonstrate to a circumcised people the sanctity and truth of the revelation of Mahomet”.
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.
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Subscribe“If you have any mind at all
Gibbon’s divine “Decline & Fall”
sounds pretty flimsy,
no more than a whimsy.
By way of contrast,
on Wednesday last,
I went to a Maaarvelous party. ……”
(Noel Coward)
Gibbon’s is some of the finest prose I ever did read – perhaps not to everyone’s taste, sed de gustibus non disputandum est. His (many) detractors do share common features, I have always thought: the need to step on predecessors who lacked access to knowledge that they as successors had, the better to further their careers; the characteristic sneer of the insecure academic on the make; most culpably, a notable lack of humanity and humour.
I can’t say I’ve ever sought recourse to any single historical account as a definitive record – to be so simplistic can paint you into some tight and uncomfortable corners, after all. I suppose I enjoy Gibbon most of all for the sheer scope of his achievement. As a friend pointed out to me: he would have needed to travel extensively to consult source materials in the 18th century, a feat in itself in that time.
I’ll keep “Decline And Fall…” forever on my bookshelf. It may be flawed, yes, but it sparkles.
Reading Decline and Fall counts as one of the richest and most memorable intellectual pilgrimages of my life. That is the way I recall it and the only way I can describe it.
I was moved, rather like Keats when he wrote of Chapman –
“Much have I travell’d in the realms of gold,
And many goodly states and kingdoms seen; “
As you go on to say, Gibbon’s own work is its own best testament and witness. It has the ineluctable force of true genius. ‘The sheer scope of his achievement’ as you put it so well, is the thing. That sublime and unmistakeable stylistic and thematic integrity, , almost Dantean in its beauty and propriety. which only the very greatest works of art achieve, possess and sustain.
Yes, enriching is the word, to be sure. And I think you’re right: it is, foremost, a piece of art.
Gibbon did all his traveling in libraries.
As evidence of which, you have what? Open question.
Cracking article. Anyone not inclined to read it there is an audiobook version (which includes footnotes) by Charlton Griffin who has a great voice for this sort of thing.
Some of the best prose ever written, as the article has already elaborated upon, especially in invective: (of an Alexandrian archbishop) ” At that time the archiepiscopal throne of Alexandria was filled by Theophilus, the perpetual enemy of peace and virtue; a bold, bad man, whose hands were alternately polluted with gold and with blood.”. He is endlessly quotable. His weighing of christian saints, while scandalous at the time, would now be considered even-handed if not always factual. He elucidates the faults of St Constantine the Great (equal-to-the-apostles) but he approves the role of a fellow polemicist, St Chrysostom: “When Chrysostom thundered, from the pulpit of St. Sophia, against the degeneracy of the Christians, his shafts were spent among the crowd, without wounding, or even marking, the character of any individual. When he declaimed against the peculiar vices of the rich, poverty might obtain a transient consolation from his invectives; but the guilty were still sheltered by their numbers; and the reproach itself was dignified by some ideas of superiority and enjoyment. But as the pyramid rose towards the summit, it insensibly diminished to a point; and the magistrates, the ministers, the favourite eunuchs, the ladies of the court, the empress Eudoxia herself, had a much larger share of guilt to divide among a smaller proportion of criminals.”
The article is a little unfair in saying that the author does not bring anything to the understanding of truth. I would counter that his tastes, while self-consciously “enlightened” are of a unmistakably protestant disposition which, being an Englishman of the 18th century, is hardly surprising: (of the Hagia Sophia of Justinian) “A magnificent temple is a laudable monument of national taste and religion; and the enthusiast who entered the dome of St. Sophia might be tempted to suppose that it was the residence, or even the workmanship, of the Deity. Yet how dull is the artifice, how insignificant is the labour, if it be compared with the formation of the vilest insect that crawls upon the surface of the temple!”
More please Unherd.
A fine comment. You had me reaching for my commonplace book for my own favourite passages.
It strikes me that readers often mistake Gibbon’s anti-Papistry for common-or-garden atheism.
His dislike is of ‘superstition’ is almost always meant with the old protestant meaning of the word – unnecessary accretions added to the simplicity of the gospel and the two sacraments. Nowhere does one mark him disparage Christ or His Gospel. He is equally, if not more, scathing about the superstition of the late Academy and the efforts of the Emperor Julian to revive Classical polytheism.
What else can be said? Gibbon is truly great. If this article persuades only one person to put down their devices and read Decline and Fall in full from cover to cover it will have done a great work for the common good and civil society.
Is it not broader than anti-Papistry alone?
“…..Christianity had some influence on the decline and fall of the Roman empire. The clergy successfully preached the doctrines of patience and pusillanimity; the active virtues of society were discouraged; and the last remains of military spirit were buried in the cloister: a large portion of public and private wealth was consecrated to the specious demands of charity and devotion; and the soldiers’ pay was lavished on the useless multitudes of both sexes who could only plead the merits of abstinence and chastity. Faith, zeal, curiosity, and more Earthly passions of malice and ambition kindled the flame of theological discord; the church, and even the state, were distracted by religious factions, whose conflicts were sometimes bloody and always implacable; the attention of the emperors was diverted from camps to synods; the Roman world was oppressed by a new species of tyranny; and the persecuted sects became the secret enemies of their country.”
To my eyes, as a Protestant familiar with the language of (particularly English) Protestantism, that famous passage is Gibbon drawing an indictment of the folly and superstition of the institution of Monasticism – ‘the cloister’ and the ‘uselss multitudes’ are the monasteries and the monastics.
As I read it, what Gibbon is describing there is the growth of the vast monastic estates, the beginnings of the troubles attendant upon Erastianism and the subsequent development of factionalism which arose from the the beginnings of the Aryan controversy.
It depends whether one thinks Monasticism, Erastianism and state policed Orthodoxy are Christian, or precisely the opposite. I am persuaded Gibbon was of the latter view. If he can anywhere be found to criticise the message of the Gospel or the life and example of Christ I would be glad to acknowledge my error.
Arian controversy – from Arius.
In terms of Gibbon having lessons for today (as per the author’s assertion), if one were to substitute the term “progressives” for Christianity in that passage, it’d make perfect sense in 2024.
The marvellous thing about Gibbon, and it’s true of the Gospels also (and the Platonic Dialogues for that matter) is that he (deeply unfashionably) places the causes of human failure and political calamity firmly in the hearts, minds, characters and choices of living men in each and every day. Not ascribing to the epehemeral parties which consist at any one time the eternal truths which transcend their abstract nominal vessels.
Sounds like today.
If the Muslims had won, there wouldn’t be an Oxford. Given what’s become of Britain, I’m surprised there still is.
I had similar thoughts. There are many places in the UK today where one could assume the Muslims did win the Battle of Tours.
“The most scandalous charges were suppressed: the Vicar of Christ was only accused of piracy, murder, rape, sodomy and incest.” That was the one that got me, over 40 years ago now!
When it comes to the history of Rome and Byzantium, I’d rather read Bury and Runciman. Gibbon doesn’t do much for me, but his book and the books of other “Enlightenment” era historians have their place under the Sun.
“My English text is chaste, and all licentious passages are left in the decent obscurity of a learned language.” As a young student it was a reward for hours of learning Latin that one could more easily translate those licentious passages searched out like a truffle hound.
How nice! Very well done, thank you. And bravo to UnHerd for publishing long-form serious criticism.
I stopped reading Gibbon’s weighty tomes when I realized his hostility to Christianity was because he was a homosexual; a single man, never married. “Not that it matters,” as we hastily say today. But no wonder the early church was treated so roughly at his hands. Both the Old and New Testaments condemned the practice straight up several times. Ed was a wickedly funny guy in the Oscar Wilde and more recent Gore Vidal styles, you have to give him that.
Nice piece. But perhaps he does hold the key to some eternal truth. The selected passage about the part played by Christianity is indeed well-chosen. The sword and the Q’uran marching on Constantinople, subsequently held from the gates of Vienna for a millennium by the folks in Belgrade and Eastern Europe, something misunderstood by European transplants like Clinton, Albright or Wes Clarke, to whom the only important Thing in History happened on July 4, 1776. Perhaps in our own Balkan moment, ignited as always by a tiny core of fixated persons, just as so many in the French and German military foresee, the Americans can arrange precision NATO air strikes on Hamburg, Paris, London and Vienna?
Let’s not forget it was the “Christian” Crusaders who sacked and weakened Constantinople to the point it could not defend itself from the Seljuks and Ottomans.
Good point, Jim. Not only that, but the West was divided … just as it is today, and to which division we can include state capitalist China. Unnecessarily, and to the detriment of the West writ large, including the Sino-capitalist West.
Great read, thank you.
4000 pages? Had I but world enough and time…
“Fun” is right. I read Gibbon about 25 years ago, and am very much inclined to repeat the experience.