[In the following essay, Mason examines Gibbon's use of irony in describing early Christians in Chapter 15 of the Decline and Fall.]

And shaped his weapon with an edge severe,
          Sapping a solemn creed with solemn sneer,
          The lord of irony …

Byron

… the contrast [between Swift's irony and Gibbon's] is so complete that any one point is difficult to isolate. Gibbon's irony, in the fifteenth chapter, may be aimed against, instead of for, Christianity, but contrasted with Swift's it is an assertion of faith. The decorously insistent pattern of Gibbonian prose insinuates a solidarity with the reader (the implied solidarity in Swift is itself ironical—a means to betrayal), establishes an understanding and habituates to certain assumptions. The reader, it is implied, is an eighteenth-century gentleman (‘rational’, ‘candid’, ‘polite’, ‘elegant’, ‘humane’); eighteen hundred years ago he would have been a pagan gentleman, living by these same standards (those of absolute civilization); by these standards (present everywhere in the stylized prose and adroitly emphasized at key-points in such phrases at “the polite Augustus”, “the elegant mythology of the Greeks”) the Jews and early Christians are seen to have been ignorant fanatics, uncouth and probably dirty. Gibbon as a historian of Christianity had, we know, limitations; but the positive standards by reference to which his irony works represent something impressively realized in eighteenth-century civilization; impressively ‘there’ too in the grandiose, assured and ordered elegance of his history … Gibbon's irony … habituates and reassures, ministering to a kind of judicial certitude or complacency. Swift's is essentially a matter of surprise and negation; its function is to defeat habit, to intimidate and to demoralize.

Leavis

There are many kinds of irony in the history. The whole scheme may be considered ironic in the sense that it makes us feel and see the contrast between what man has been and might be and what he became in the decline from the best days of the Roman republic. But the special brand of irony we associate with the name of Gibbon is most strikingly seen in his treatment of Christianity. For Christianity offers this contrast between the ideal and the actual in a peculiarly acute form. Yet even here we must make many distinctions, since Gibbon's tactics and attitudes are not uniform. The peculiar richness of the intellectual means he employs may well be derived from his own experience as a young man first converted to the Roman Catholic faith and then reasoned out of it by Protestant arguments; it is also possible that he might never have found some of his most telling devices if he had not appreciated the dazzling tactics used by Pascal to discredit the Jesuits. We read the history today because of the irony.

The place in the history where Gibbon's irony is most varied and most concentrated is the notorious fifteenth chapter entitled “The Progress of the Christian Religion, and the Sentiments, Manners, Numbers, and Conditions, of the primitive Christians”.¹ But Gibbon must evidently be distinguished from such overt enemies of religion as Voltaire and Lucretius, even though at times he borrows their methods. Almost certainly, he could not have mobilised opinion in favour of his deepest convictions by direct presentation. It is of the essence of his irony to remain apparently neutral and uncommitted, and he is at his most deadly and devastating when he is apparently advancing arguments in favour of Christianity. And all his devices are, as Byron wrote, those of a general who uses engineers to sap the foundations of the enemy's fortress. He makes no use of the noisier methods of war. For he wishes our reason to act as a dissolvent of faith. Often he does this by declaring the very opposite: i.e. that only a careless observer would conclude from the behaviour of the early Christians that Christianity was an illusion. At other times, he allows the deadly shafts to be fired by rival sectarians, while he himself abstains from comment.

Much of the irony is consciously measured against the predictable responses to it of the history's first Christian readers, and this is because Gibbon knew that in many respects the good Christian of his day was his secret ally. For all the lip-service paid to the primitive church and the earliest forms of Christianity, the actual religion of Gibbon's day was founded on quite different principles from those which led to the founding of the primitive Church. The Christian of Gibbon's day hoped to reconcile his belief in reason, truth and nature with his belief in the sacred truths he had to take on trust. But it would be a bold man who would claim in comparing these two sets of beliefs that the Christian set was held more firmly than the pagan. But Gibbon had to observe the limits of his Christian readers' unavowed scepticism. They may individually have drawn the line at different places, but all would have reserved the figure of God in all His persons from the eye of candid scepticism. Gibbon is therefore careful never to arouse such readers against him by direct consideration of how far Christ himself was a calamity for civilisation, although he comes very near to the Lucretian attitude of tantum religio potuit suadere malorum!

The effect achieved is to set up in the face of Christian ideals the strong conviction that a truly civilised man cannot be persuaded to part with the certain values of this life in favour of dubious and merely speculative advantages. And the power of the irony can never be greater than the power of the ideals in the service of which Gibbon employs it. Gibbon himself understood this and grounds his attack on Christianity on an appeal to the common consent of mankind, his question before this tribunal being, Do not the agreed facts prove that the early Christians ran counter to the ideals that govern civilised life everywhere and at all times? The following is therefore a key passage.

PRINCIPLES OF HUMAN NATURE

There are two very natural propensities which we may distinguish in the most virtuous and liberal dispositions, the love of pleasure and the love of action. If the former be refined by art and learning, improved by the charms of social intercourse, and corrected by a just regard to œconomy, to health, and to reputation, it is productive of the greatest part of the happiness of private life. The love of action is a principle of a much stronger and more doubtful nature. It often leads to anger, to ambition, and to revenge; but, when it is guided by the sense of propriety and benevolence, it becomes the parent of every virtue; and, if those virtues are accompanied with equal abilities, a family, a state, or an empire may be indebted for their safety and prosperity to the undaunted courage of a single man. To the love of pleasure we may therefore ascribe most of the agreeable, to the love of action we may attribute most of the useful and respectable, qualifications. The character in which both the one and the other should be united and harmonised, would seem to constitute the most perfect idea of human nature. The insensible and inactive disposition, which should be supposed alike destitute of both, would be rejected, by the common consent of mankind, as utterly incapable of procuring any happiness to the individual, or any public benefit to the world. But it was not in this world that the primitive Christians were desirous of making themselves either agreeable or useful.

(pp. 482-483)

The irony is the most valuable side of the history because it serves and brings about the central effect intended, which was to enrich men's reflection on the worth of life and to make clear to them its significance. Every ironic stroke, apparently a destructive blow, is in fact a shaping line bringing into further definition the image of some virtue. There may be values which simply do not come up for discussion in the history, and among such values we may find some without which, for us, life would have neither worth nor significance. But so long as we care about civilisation, we are bound to include Gibbon's ideals along with those which he does not consider but we cling to and place high.

We can feel the tension between our ideals and his from the moment when, in the fifteenth chapter, we see that Gibbon is not going to entertain the hypothesis that the cause of the rapid growth of Christianity was the intervention of the supernatural in the affairs of man. Gibbon's whole style is a proclamation that reason knows nothing and can know nothing of the supernatural. It is a claim to represent and embody the whole of knowledge and a claim which excludes from the realm of the scibile all that belongs to the world of fancy, of feeling, or of faith.

It is characteristic of all insidious attacks to appear to be directing the main charge on some subsidiary target, which only later is seen to have carried the chief objective. The enemy seems to be content to win small and irrelevant gains, which the victim grants the more easily because nothing vital seems to be involved. Thus Gibbon arouses the dislike of English people for the intolerance and cruelty of the Jews, as if he were going to contrast the Christians favourably in a later section. We think that all we have conceded is the reasonable reflection:

How odd
Of God
To choose
The Jews,

but as the details accumulate and we see Jew and Christian confounded, we are tempted to reflect that it was very odd to believe that God had chosen either Jews or Christians.

By his irony Gibbon succeeds in making us enquire whether the first Christians founded their faith on anything we should call sound evidence. His most powerful weapon is a roundabout argument, which may be summed up in the question: what are we to think of people who degraded the greatest philosophers of the world to the level of the diabolically possessed or the eternally damned? This question forces into the open the most serious weighing of opposed values an enlightened eighteenth-century Christian had to face. Dante, we know, could not bring himself to associate the great pagan philosophers, moralists and poets with the rest of the damned. He puts them in what Hemingway called “a clean, well-lighted place” apart from the other pagans. This compromise was impossible for the first Humanists. Erasmus makes one of his speakers elevate Socrates to the rank of a Saint. (Sancte Socrates, ora pro nobis.) We are not worried to learn that Christ included no philosophers among his lower-class disciples, but Gibbon's contemporaries would take very seriously the known fact that no eminent pagan in the early years of the Christian era even deigned so much as to notice the emergence of Christianity. The following passage was therefore in Gibbon's day the cruellest twist of the knife:

But how shall we excuse the supine inattention of the Pagan and philosophic world, to those evidences which were presented by the hand of Omnipotence, not to their reason, but to their senses? During the age of Christ, of his apostles, and of their first disciples, the doctrine which they preached was confirmed by innumerable prodigies. The lame walked, the blind saw, the sick were healed, the dead were raised, dæmons were expelled, and the laws of Nature were frequently suspended for the benefit of the church. But the sages of Greece and Rome turned aside from the awful spectacle, and, pursuing the ordinary occupations of life and study, appeared unconscious of any alterations in the moral and physical government of the world. Under the reign of Tiberius, the whole earth, or at least a celebrated province of the Roman empire, was involved in a praeternatural darkness of three hours. Even this miraculous event, which ought to have excited the wonder, the curiosity, and the devotion of mankind, passed without notice in an age of science and history.

(pp. 517-518)

Here, as so often in Gibbon, we may study the retrospective action of his irony. In this passage, where the main works are blown sky-high, we are made to look back and trace how the enemy crept up so close unobserved. If we turn back, we see that he reached his climax by gradations of irony:

And yet these exceptions are either too few in number, or too recent in time, entirely to remove the imputation of ignorance and obscurity which has been so arrogantly cast on the first proselytes of Christianity. Instead of employing in our defence the fictions of later ages, it will be more prudent to convert the occasion of scandal into a subject of edification. Our serious thoughts will suggest to us, that the apostles themselves were chosen by providence among the fishermen of Galilee, and that, the lower we depress the temporal condition of the first Christians, the more reason we shall find to admire their merit and success. It is incumbent on us diligently to remember, that the kingdom of Heaven was promised to the poor in spirit, and that minds afflicted by calamity and the contempt of mankind, cheerfully listen to the divine promise of future happiness; while, on the contrary, the fortunate are satisfied with the possession of this world; and the wise abuse in doubt and dispute their vain superiority of reason and knowledge.

We stand in need of such reflections, to comfort us for the loss of some illustrious characters, which in our eyes might have seemed the most worthy of the heavenly present. The names of Seneca, of the elder and the younger Pliny, of Tacitus, of Plutarch, of Galen, of the slave Epictetus, and of the emperor Marcus Antoninus, adorn the age in which they flourished, and exalt the dignity of human nature. They filled with glory their respective stations, either in active or contemplative life; their excellent understandings were improved by study; Philosophy had purified their minds from the prejudices of the popular superstition; and their days were spent in the pursuit of truth and the practice of virtue. Yet all these sages (it is no less an object of surprise than of concern) overlooked or rejected the perfection of the Christian system. Their language or their silence equally discover their contempt for the growing sect, which in their time had diffused itself over the Roman empire. Those among them who condescend to mention the Christians, consider them only as obstinate and perverse enthusiasts, who exacted an implicit submission to their mysterious doctrines, without being able to produce a single argument that could engage the attention of men of sense and learning.

(pp. 515-516)

The first paragraph opens with language that might have been taken from a Christian apologist. But this tone at the end begins to conflict with the matter. There is more than an insinuation that the connection between Christian belief in a future world and the material conditions of the believer might be that of cause and effect, and it is hard to be as sure that the epithet “vain” for “reason and knowledge” is to be taken as much at its face value as the earlier “arrogant” for “the imputation of ignorance and obscurity”. We are thus half prepared to be troubled at the suggestion in the next paragraph that by our standards quite other people than the disciples ought to have been chosen for heaven. This trouble grows as their claims are set out. Gibbon catches and plays with it in his parenthesis (it is no less an object of surprise than of concern) and he forces us to see the Christians as contemptible frauds, as long as we identify ourselves with “men of sense and learning”. Every sentence contributes a point to clinch the climax. It is an epitome of the irony of the whole chapter.

Once Gibbon had made his points by the controlled irony of the fifteenth chapter, he felt free in the rest of the history to relax and extend his tone. Occasionally his contempt or indignation is openly expressed or he indulges his amusement at Christian extravagances. The irony, that is to say, becomes that of a satirist who refuses to treat his victims as fully human and equal to himself. For example, all these less decorous modes of irony are employed at once to degrade the monks and to excite abhorrence of the nasty vermin's power derived from their noxious swarms. The object of satire is thus seen as contemptibly small and disgusting in the individual but formidable in the mass. Many of Gibbon's satiric devices are those used by the poets, Dryden and Pope. The use of inflated language to describe the despicably petty is a well-known resource of the mock-heroic. Pope had popularised the incongruous introduction of a surprising element into a commonplace list, as in

Puffs, Powders, Patches, Bibles, Billet-doux.

Gibbon gives us “punished the innocent and guilty by imprisonment, confiscation, and baptism”.

Frequent as these departures from the severely decorous mode appear when we survey the whole history, Gibbon is nevertheless far more restrained than the Augustan satirists. He is never as rollicking as Butler or Garth, or as savage as Swift. He is too much in earnest and has too great a regard for the dignity of his rôle as a historian to allow himself the glorious effects of satiric hyperbole. The gusto we might wish for in his narrative is usually confined to his notes. His is a civilised irony, controlled to serve its purpose, which was to challenge by presenting the sharpest possible edge of fineness to the rather heavier, slightly complacent, form of Augustanism that succeeded on the passing of its heyday some years after the death of Pope. It is poorer in imaginative flights than that of Pope, but it rests on wider and more solid convictions. It acts as a sharpening tonic on prose that might otherwise have struck us as too oratorical, ornate and pompous.

Note

1. The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Volume the First, 1776. pp. 449-518.