SOURCE: Pocock, J. G. A. “Superstition and Enthusiasm in Gibbon's History of Religion.” Eighteenth-Century Life 8, no. 1 (October 1982): 83-94.

[In the following lecture, originally presented at a conference in October 1981, Pocock identifies religion as the central concern in the Decline and Fall.]

The Decline and Fall, from beginning to end—and the later volumes richly reward close study—is profoundly concerned with the capacity of religion in its various forms to stabilise, to destroy, and to reconstitute the fabric of civilised society; so that history is largely determined by religion, and religion—while reduced from the sacred to the secular dimension—is one of the greatest phenomena of history. In this sense, Gibbon's history of religion is essential to the structure and texture of his work as a whole; and I intend in this essay to argue that it is organised around—though it does not mechanically apply—the distinction between superstition and enthusiasm constructed by Hume in the essay bearing that name, in the Natural History of Religion, and in the chapters of the History of England which have to do with the Protestant Reformation and the Puritan Revolution.

Let us remind ourselves what that distinction is in summary. Superstition is the worship of the godhead in objects perceived by the senses; its ultimate form is probably the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation. It is conducive to the rule of priests, who manufacture and manipulate the objects of worship, but it also renders people obedient to civil order in so far as the authority of priests is capable of imposing this.¹ Enthusiasm is the worship of the ideas or scriptures in which the godhead is apparent to men, and occurs when the mind is alone with these ideas or scriptures and no sensory, priestly, or civil authority is permitted to act as mediator; its ultimate form is probably the antinomian conviction that the worshipper is himself pervaded, infused, or inspired by the godhead, which may have dismissed the mediating authority of ideas and scriptures themselves.² It is conducive to civil liberty, because belief in the indwelling spirit may encourage rebellion against the authority of priests or princes; but since while it lasts it tends to suspend all the normal springs of human conduct—which consist in the mind's response to the ideas generated by sensory experience—it is also dangerous to the being of civil society itself.³ However, it may ultimately burn itself out (Hume cites the case of the Quakers)⁴ and leave the mind alone with the objects of sensory and social experience; and this may lead back to that reign of opinion, of civil society founded on the authority of experience, which is the High Enlightenment's ultimate formula for authority and liberty alike. Since enthusiasm is the idolatry of the Word, and superstition the idolatry of the Word made Flesh, there is not much room left for an authentic Christianity between them.

Thus—except for the last sentence—Hume, and thus also Gibbon. He regularly employs, without confounding, the terms “superstition” and “enthusiasm” in the senses I have just given, and there are enough citations of Hume's writings to tell us that he knew where he had found them. A third term, “fanaticism,” he employs, en bon philosophe, as applicable to either form of religion at any appropriate moment; but here we must take a further step in the understanding of religion as a historical phenomenon. The original form of superstition is polytheism: the invention of gods by the imagination, which attaches divinity to natural objects and real or imaginary natural persons;⁵ and there is a very important sense in which it is impossible for the polytheist to be a fanatic, because he does not attach truth-status to any of the stories that he tells. The polytheist, Hume and Gibbon both tell us, is a mythographer or a mythopoet, not (or not yet), a philosopher; any sense that the tales he tells about some legendary being or sacred object are true, and therefore incompatible with the truth of some other tale about some other being or object, is alien to what Gibbon typically calls “the loose and careless temper of Polytheism.”⁶ It is only with the transition from polytheism to monotheism, to the belief that there is only one god and that all other gods are false, that religion becomes capable of fanaticism, of the assertion that its tales are true and imply the falsity of other tales. Since monotheism remains capable of finding expression in mythography and superstition, it is possible for superstition to become fanatical; but this is also the moment in history at which there appears philosophy, in the sense of an equipment of the mind to distinguish between true and false statements and to establish the principles by which the truth may be known. When the statements and their truth become modes of knowing the true god, intelligibility becomes one of his attributes and intellect a means by which the mind may approach and share in his godhead. This is the point at which it becomes possible for enthusiasm to appear and to be fanatical.

Fanaticism and enthusiasm are therefore functions of the emergence of two phenomena, monotheism and philosophy; and the two latter are intimately connected. We instinctively think of the One God as the god of prophecy; but the structure of the Decline and Fall is, I believe, deeply and vividly illuminated by those sentences at the beginning of Hume's Natural History of Religion which declare: “It is a matter of fact incontestable, that about 1700 years ago all mankind were polytheists. The doubtful and sceptical principles of a few philosophers, or the theism, and that too not entirely pure, of one or two nations, form no objection worth regarding.”⁷ The latter sentence clearly transmits one of the Enlightenment's favourite messages, which is that Israel does not count and is to be ignored as far as possible; and Hume proceeds to analyse monotheism in terms of theology, which he describes as the making of statements about the godhead which are philosophical and not (as far as his examination goes) prophetic at all. Monotheism appears in the natural history of religion at the moment when the intellect becomes capable of constructing propositions claiming the status of universal truth; it is the product of metaphysics rather than of prophecy, and it is truer to state that the philosophers were the first monotheists than to state the converse. It follows that the discovery of monotheism, with all its terrifying consequences in the shapes of fanaticism and enthusiasm, was a Hellenic rather than a Judaic achievement.

By enthusiasm, the eighteenth century—especially in Britain—chiefly meant the chiliasm and antinomianism of the seventeenth-century sects: a spectre which haunted the dreams of the age and walked now and again in such episodes as the Gordon Riots (of which Gibbon was a witness). But it is valuable to have been reminded, by the researches of Margaret Jacob, that the term was also applicable to that prisca theologia which found continuing expression in the hermetic and masonic societies (or sects) of the Radical Enlightenment,⁸ and which by denying the separation of spirit from matter contrived to be atheist and pantheist, materialist and magian, at the same time. Such late-Enlightenment figures as Mesmer⁹ and Goethe further remind us that the indwellingness of spirit in matter, of two souls in the same breast, never ceased to be asserted; and Gibbon was to discover his bête noire in the blended materialism and millennialism of Joseph Priestley. At an early point in the Decline and Fall, he located the roots of an enthusiasm which was to help destroy the ancient world in philosophies derived from Plato rather than in messianic prophecies derived from Moses, Isaiah, or Jesus.

Ancient philosophy had been metaphysical; it had sought to reduce the world to a unity of intelligibility, with the result that the mind was left alone with its own ideas, which forthwith invaded it and moved it to enthusiasm. But the ancients were capable of esprit de mèthode as well as esprit de système; the mind contemplating the ultimate unity might perceive that its powers could never reach it, and might fall back on that judicious and practical self-limitation by which the philosophes expressed their deep suspicion of all philosophising. In various Stoic and Epicurean forms, the Roman magisterial elite—whom Gibbon depicts in the silver age of the Antonine emperors—had made doubt the instrument of empire and had regarded the various polytheisms over which they ruled as “equally false” and “equally useful” (Chap. 2, 1:28). Hence, of course, the Jewish wars and the Christian persecutions; by asserting its truth, monotheism ceased to be usable. But in the end scepticism had destroyed both superstition and itself; as the masses perceived that their masters thought their gods ridiculous, they turned to new and more syncretic religions, and as the practice of philosophic magistracy became increasingly impossible under the military anarchy and despotism of the late empire, the ruling elites turned to a neo-Platonism indistinguishable from the new popular religions. Gibbon writes:

Consuming their reason in these deep but unsubstantial meditations, their minds were exposed to illusions of fancy. They … by a very singular revolution, converted the study of philosophy into that of magic. The ancient sages had derided the popular superstition; after disguising its extravagance by the thin pretence of allegory, the disciples of Plotinus and Porphyry became its most zealous defenders.

(Chap. 13, 1:392-93)

An era of enthusiasm had begun, an era of superstition defended by zeal. But Gibbon, it should be noted, here remains true to Hume in stressing the relation of philosophy to polytheism, in which prophecy cannot have much part to play.

Christianity, however, was a religion of another temper; it aimed at and in the end achieved the destruction of all the polytheisms and superstitions that had preceded it, and in explaining this phenomenon the Judaic proclamation that God was one had clearly to be allowed some part. All that Gibbon will concede to the Jewish origins of Christianity is that Mosaic law and Messianic prophecy taught “that unsocial people” (Chap. 15, 2:5) less that God was one than that he was peculiarly theirs and all other peoples and their gods detestable. The Christians acquired this intolerance but, “armed with the strength of the Mosaic law, and delivered from the weight of its fetters” (2:6), they transformed it into a creed which offered to embrace all mankind while destroying all if its previous beliefs. Gibbon has his full share of the antisemitism of the Enlightenment—Jews, black Africans, monks, and the followers of Peter the Hermit form those categories of mankind of whom he never finds a good word to say—and he minimises as far as he can the mutation of the Messiah into the Redeemer. Jesus he presents as a humble moral teacher (Chap. 47, 5:97-98), the myth of whose resurrection entailed two strictly Hellenic consequences. One is the doctrine of personal immortality, on whose Platonic rather than Jewish character Gibbon insists and which he makes into a principal cause of the expansion of Christianity (Chap. 15, 2:19-27). The other is the equally Platonic doctrine of the incarnate Logos, whose exploration by the misdirected energies of the Greek mind accounts for the entire subsequent history of theological debate over the nature of Christ and the unity of the Godhead (Chap. 21, 2:335-47). What differentiates Gibbon from all other philosophes is his determination to study the ramifications of theology, as historically serious even when philosophically absurd.

So far, Christianity belongs in that category of religious phenomena termed enthusiasm; but it is Gibbon's plan to recount “the progress … the final triumph, and the gradual corruption of Christianity” (Chap. 37, 4:57), and since we also know that he insists on considering himself bon protestant—pratiquant, si non croyant—it is not unduly to anticipate his argument to say that the rise of the papacy will be a signal feature of that corruption, and that papal rule will appear an effect of superstition. There is to be a movement from enthusiasm to superstition; but what does Gibbon wish us to understand about Christianity before its enthusiasm was corrupt? This faith arises in the decadence of the empire, which in turn arises from the decadence of the republic. Gibbon constantly describes the primitive and persecuted church as a republic (Chap. 15, 2:39-43 and passim) from which a normal application of eighteenth-century categories deduces the conclusion that enthusiasm was its virtue. He does not fail to remind us that this enthusiasm, being focused on membership in a community not of this world, subverted the civil order of this one; but the order it subverted was the Antonine rule of enlightened sceptics over superstitious peoples, already dying of the effects of its own despotism. Like other republics, the Christian was prone to corruption and decay: it passed from congregational democracy to episcopal aristocracy and papal monarchy (2:44-46 and passim) and this corruption entailed the passage from enthusiasm to superstition; but another corruption and usurpation preceded it, namely the co-optation of the church by Constantine and the enlistment of the Christian republic in the service of despotism. Gibbon had mixed feelings about the Augustan principate, but could find little good in the Constantinian sacred monarchy, and we light here upon an interesting tension in his thought. Historic Protestantism was by no means averse to emperors; its Ghibelline roots were deep, and the figure of a Protestant saviour-emperor had long haunted its apocalyptic imagination. Yet Gibbon, as we shall see, is as hostile to emperors as to popes, and in some important ways more so; and his thought on this subject too can be organised around the tension between enthusiasm and superstition.

The central figure of the Decline and Fall's second volume is Julian the Apostate. Gibbon felt for this immensely attractive figure an affection bordering on love but mixed with an increasing disappointment and condemnation. The reason was his growing realisation that Julian was not a second Marcus Aurelius, not a would-be restorer of the Antonine enlightenment, not a sceptical and tolerant Stoic, but an enthusiastic and fanatical neo-Platonic magician (Chap. 23, 2:432-33, 436-44). Gibbon seems to have been a member of a freemasons' lodge at Lausanne; but one has only to read his account of Julian getting himself initiated into the mysteries at Ephesus and Eleusis (2:440-41) to know what he would have thought of all esoteric brotherhoods of hermetic philosophy from Pythagoras to Pamina. Reason might have to observe silence in the presence of the superstitious mob; but its silence should be public, that of a magistrate washing his hands and caring for none of these things. It had no business huddling into caverns to chatter in a secret language about mysteries too deep to utter; that was enthusiasm. I do not know Gibbon's tastes in music,¹⁰ but they were not Mozartian.

Julian failed as an enlightened emperor because he succumbed to enthusiasm; but at the same time he set himself against the Christian republic in which enthusiasm was organised as a kind of virtue. Gibbon condemns with increasing severity Julian's inclination to make his reign a campaign against the Christians. This was imprudent and it bordered on tyranny; perhaps his death in the Persian war was all that saved him from degeneration. But the Christian republic was already corrupted by theological debate under Constantinian auspices, and here an exceptional interest attaches to Gibbon's selection as Julian's principal opponent of Athanasius, archbishop of Alexandria. For Athanasius was also the opponent of Arius; and it was the tradition of that enlightened Protestantism which merged with the Radical Enlightenment to prefer the Christology of Arius, which bordered on Unitarianism, as more rational and less superstitious than that of Athanasius, which merged with Trinitarian and Catholic orthodoxy. Henry Stubbe and John Toland in writings they were prepared to circulate or publish,¹¹ Isaac Newton in manuscripts he kept very dark,¹² had castigated Athanasius as the author of Trinitarianism and transubstantiation; and the two former at least had praised Arius as the continuator of a philosophical underground of rational Christianity which had survived to become the “secret writing” of Islam. Not so Gibbon; esoteric rationalism had no charms for him, and though he considers Athanasius' Christology as misguided as that of Arius—and even finds time to salute Newton for exploding the text of the Three Witnesses (Chap. 47, 5:104, n. 17)—he uses very high language in endowing the archbishop with every virtue of statesmanship. Athanasius was “qualified for the government of a great monarchy” (Chap. 21, 2:362); if he was ever involved in the giving of bribes, so were Cato and Sidney (2:368, n. 117); he was rescued in old age from one more exile by “the zeal of a great people, who instantly flew to arms” (Chap. 25, 3:26). It is not usual in Gibbon to allow the mob of Christian Alexandria this degree of Roman virtue.

One hardly dares to suggest that Gibbon prefers Athanasius' more complete doctrine of the Incarnation as involving the Christian more decisively in the virtues of this world; yet Athanasius typifies the Christian republic in a way that raises his virtue above that of Julian or Arius. All virtue is now flawed, the archbishop's through fanaticism, the emperor's through enthusiasm and despotism: “Alexander was transformed into Diogenes—the philosopher was degraded into a priest” (Chap. 24, 2:529). But it is the historic fate of virtue to undergo corruption, and we know that the Christian republic is to become the superstitious paparchy. The rhetoric of this transformation is extremely complex, and the remarkable use of Diogenes in the epigram just quoted is complicated further when Gibbon, writing of the detestable Cyril of Alexandria in the next century, says that a certain Isidore of Pelusium “is a saint, but he never became a bishop; and I half suspect that the pride of Diogenes trampled on the pride of Plato” (Chap. 47, 5:111, n. 32). I more than suspect that our understanding of the Decline and Fall would be much enhanced if we could disentangle the meaning of that extraordinary footnote.

I pass over two of the major episodes of Gibbon's history of religion—the growth of monasticism (Chap. 37), which we expect him to find the ultimate enthusiasm but he in fact condemns as the ultimate superstition, and the rise of Islam (Chap. 50), which he presents as the “rational enthusiasm” of a shepherd people—in order to focus attention on the relations within the church between superstition, enthusiasm, and the growth of papal monarchy. What seems at first sight to be—but in fact is not—the crucial chapter in Gibbon's development of this theme is the twenty-eighth, which recounts “the final destruction of paganism” and “the introduction of the worship of saints and relics among the Christians.” The two are ironically and antithetically related. The destruction of the pagan temples, in the age of Theodosius, is the triumph of enthusiasm over superstition; it accomplishes the total extirpation of pre-Christian polytheism in the Roman and more particularly the Latin world. But there is instantly described, as if it had immediately followed, the triumph within the church of superstition in its Christian form: the veneration of the relics of martyrs and saints, the pilgrimages to their shrines and the miracles supposedly performed at them—the worship, in short, of sensory and material objects with which the divine essence had become associated or in which it was directly expressed. From this it is only a step to denunciation of the supreme superstition, the Roman doctrine of transubstantiation; and if Gibbon does not make its appearance the central event of his later volumes, it is because he hardly needs to, and because his decision to write the history of the Eastern Empire relegates that of Latin Christianity to a place on its densely populated margins. What occurs in chapter 28 is purely Humean: the greatest recorded example of that flux and reflux of polytheism and monotheism, superstition and enthusiasm, which Gibbon's master—for such Hume was in a number of ways—had declared inherent in the Natural History of Religion.¹³ Enthusiasm had destroyed pagan superstition, but a Christian polytheism instantly seized upon the church.

And this we might expect to be the culmination of the story. Superstition was incompatible with the enthusiasm, whether licensed or disciplined, hitherto ascribed to the Christian republic; the popes could now lay hands on the material objects of Christian superstition and subject them to their authority, and the counter-revolution of the shrines which followed the destruction of the temples must form the prelude to the establishment of the papal monarchy. Gibbon could now look ahead, as he had done already, to the Reformation of the sixteenth century as the work of “a crowd of daring fanatics” (Chap. 16, 2:139), who destroyed the images, denied transubstantiation, and assailed the papacy in the next reflux of enthusiasm, itself the prelude to the reasonable religions, Protestant and deist, of his own age. He did indeed adopt this perspective; but there was another reformation of images to be studied first.

From the reign of Theodosius the Decline and Fall proceeds to the extinction of the Western empire, the age of Justinian, and the organisation of the concluding volumes around a series of dynamic inroads, Muslim, barbaric, and Latin, upon the unchanging sterility of the Byzantine state. Byzantium was static because there was nothing there but the Constantinian despotism, which had survived the energies of the Christian republic; but if we ask how that compared with the monarchy of papal superstition being erected farther west, we find that there were still two moments at which Greek intellectual energies provoked a response from the Latins. The first of these was the iconoclastic movement, when the Isaurian emperors, supported by “many simple or rational Christians, who … secretly desired the reformation of the church” (Chap. 49, 5:250), set out to impose upon it a destruction of images, first in the east and then in the west, where Byzantine exarchs still held authority in Italy. Here was a typical work of enthusiasm, an attempt to undo the counter-revolution of Christian polytheism; but under Leo the Isaurian, as under Julian the Apostate, enthusiasm was found allied with despotism, as the Constantinian edifice turned against itself. However, while “the patient East abjured with reluctance her sacred images, they were fondly cherished, and vigorously defended, by the independent zeal of the Italians.” These “trembled for their domestic deities” (5:255), and the Pope, Gregory II,

without depending upon prayers or miracles, boldly armed against the public enemy, and his pastoral letters admonished the Italians of their danger and their duty. At this signal, Ravenna, Venice, and the cities of the Exarchate and Pentapolis adhered to the cause of religion; their military force by sea and land consisted, for the most part of natives; and the spirit of patriotism and zeal was transfused into the mercenary strangers.

(5:260)

It was not to be expected that this display of republican virtue could last long. Gibbon proceeds to explain that “the style of the Roman senate and people was revived, but the spirit was fled. … The want of laws could only be supplied by the influence of religion, and their foreign and domestic counsels were moderated by the authority of the bishop” (5:263-64). The popes' patronage of a revived but shadowy republic was the beginning of the process which led them to alliance with the Frankish kings, to the revival of empire in the West, and to what Gibbon declares the true caesura between ancient and modern history. “Their temporal dominion is now confirmed by the reverence of a thousand years; and their noblest title is the free choice of a people whom they had redeemed from slavery” (5:264).

This is historicist, rather than Protestant, Gallican, or philosophe. Sooner or later we must recall that Gibbon in his youth had been converted to Catholicism, but there is more here than we can explain by a simple allusion to nostalgia. The papal monarchy, which corrupts religion and dominates the West by superstition—Gibbon never loses sight of this perspective—is at the same time capable of alliance with a limited revival of republican virtue; and where virtue fails, superstition is not useless in the maintenance of liberty. Like that of Athanasius and Alexandria, the example of Gregory II and eighth-century Rome reminds us that there can be a connection between clerical leadership and civic virtue; and if in the former case the link was formed by enthusiasm, in the second case the love of images, the material objects of superstition, which made the Italians fly to arms at Gregory's call, was not altogether remote from the love of property and family which makes men citizens of a republic or subjects of an ordered monarchy. Like property, superstition anchors men in the material world—so too, for that matter, does the doctrine of the Word made Flesh—and this is by no means an unmixed evil. There is a relation between liberty and religion, whether the latter is found in its enthusiastic or its superstitious forms; and Gibbon at one point draws attention to the link between the two historical phases. His account of the Normans in Sicily brings him to the figure of Pope Gregory VII, who as the asserter of clerical celibacy and the papal right to absolve all subjects of their allegiance was virtually the Antichrist of the Protestant tradition; and in a footnote Gibbon observes: “That pope was undeniably a great man, a second Athanasius, in a more fortunate age of the church. May I presume to add that the portrait of Athanasius is one of the passages of my history [and he gives the reference] with which I am the least dissatisfied?” (Chap. 56, 6:203-04, n. 101). No elaborate theory of secret writing is called for to assure us that Gibbon is sending out some kind of signal. But if Gregory VII was a second Athanasius, was poor Henry of Canossa a second Julian? The Julian of modernity has already been identified; he is (believe it or not) Frederick the Great.¹⁴

There was going on among the Scottish philosophical historians—to whom Gibbon confessed himself deeply indebted—the formation of a theory of commercial progress, which claimed that as the exchange of movable goods increased, men acquired new capacities of involvement in the material world and in relations with one another. It was a materialism of exchange preceding Marx's materialism of production. Gibbon has many chapters and passages on savagery, nomadism, and agriculture which document his commitment to this scheme;¹⁵ and I submit we are beginning to see how superstition could be brought into it. The Scottish thesis (which is also to be found in Montesquieu) had been partly a response to the need to show how the ancient republic and its virtue had become obsolete: they belonged to a world in which there was nothing to mitigate the choice between heroic action and philosophic contemplation, but the inhabitant of a commercial world had something better to do with his energies. The Decline and Fall can be seen as organized around the theses that while the subversion of civic virtue does explain the decline of the ancient world, there is no need to expect those processes to be repeated in a modern world where commerce has rendered ancient virtue obsolete. But the ancient world declined through becoming a unitary despotism, and Gibbon's case for the greater strength of modernity rests largely on the argument that Europe is a plural society, a “republic of states” as he repeatedly calls it, whose virtues cannot be stifled because they rest on interplay, emulation, and commercial exchange.¹⁶ The roots of this system are medieval, and to the limited extent that Gibbon is a historian of the medieval West, his interpretation must be consistently anti-imperial and anti-Ghibelline. “The Guelphs displayed the banner of liberty and the church” (Chap. 49, 5:304); he emphasises the role of papal policy in promoting the rise of republics in Italy—which were trading republics—and the liberties of the Germanic body in the Empire itself. Casting about for a new subject when he had finished the Decline and Fall, he contemplated and even began writing a history of the House of Brunswick,¹⁷ which might have taken him all the way from the origins of the Germanic body to the glorious House of Hanover, the Protestant Succession, and the role of commercial Britain in modern Europe. In this perspective we understand how he could see benign aspects in the history of the papal monarchy and even of superstition itself.

Nevertheless the concluding chapters of the Decline and Fall—those in which Gibbon turns from the fall of Constantinople and the Eastern Empire to consider the medieval history of the city of old Rome itself—are devoted to its failure to become either a virtuous or a commercial republic. None of its would-be civic leaders—neither Arnold of Brescia nor Cola di Rienzo (Chap. 69, 7:219-23 and Chap. 70, 7:59-79) could succeed in founding a commune; but while any pope must find himself opposed to an organisation of the citizens, the blame lay rather with the feudal conditions that had subjected the city to the bandit nobility of the Colonna and Orsini (Chap. 69, 7:247-54, 271-73, 295-96). An economy which neglected commerce in order to exploit pilgrims, however, could never provide a counterweight to noble power; and the only other source of civic dignity, prosperity, and cultivated letters—a court—was unlikely (the Renaissance popes notwithstanding) to take shape under the elective monarchy of a succession of elderly celibates (Chap. 71, 7:323-24). There is a sense in which monastic and Hildebrandine celibacy—for which the bachelor Gibbon displays an extraordinary hatred—is the ultimate and insuperable barrier separating the Church from the movement of history; and it recurs in the last chapter, and even on the last pages, of the Decline and Fall. The penultimate chapter concludes:

The maxims and effects of their temporal government may be collected from the positive and comparative view of the arts and philosophy, the agriculture and trade, the wealth and population, of the ecclesiastical state. For myself, it is my wish to depart in charity with all mankind, nor am I willing, in these last moments, to offend even the pope and clergy of Rome.

(Chap. 70, 7:299)

The irony is evident and devastating; yet there is a determination to be fair. The last chapter of all exculpates the pope and clergy from the charge of being mainly responsible for the dilapidation of Rome; they did what they could to preserve antiquity (7:310, 320-21, 323), though the government of celibates was incapable of promoting commerce and modernity. Papal Rome was a backwater, and history happened elsewhere. There was another story to tell.

Enthusiasm—the predecessor of what Burke was to call the “dreadful energy” of a state in which human talents had cast off the restraints of property¹⁸—was capable of occurring in alliance with despotism. The cases of Julian the Apostate and Leo the Isaurian show us that, and Gibbon would never have fallen for the Protestant Emperor of the Last Days, or for the World-Spirit on Horseback. Before the Humean mutation of enthusiasm into civil opinion could take place, there must occur the pluralisation of European society, in which papal monarchy and superstition had a hand to play in resisting the regrowth of imperial despotism. But Gibbon must also account for the origins of that enthusiasm which was to play a profound if transitory role in bringing about the Reformation, and in his fifty-fourth chapter he gives his version of the historical sources of Protestantism. These are wholly Greek; here is the second Eastern contribution to Latin history. The Paulicians of Syria and Cappadocia were the heirs of the Gnostics; their doctrines passed to the West, where they were taken up by the Albigensians; the Albigensians were the begetters of all medieval heretical sects, and these of the Protestant reformers (Chap. 54, 6:111, 123-25). Gibbon does not see the Albigensians as Manichean dualists so much as rational fundamentalists who insisted on reducing the Scriptures to those texts which intellect could accept (6:124); his history is a new version of that esoteric tradition of rational Christianity found in Stubbe, Toland, and the societies of the Radical Enlightenment. But he sheets the whole matter home to that restless energy of the late Platonic mind from which were derived all rationalism and all enthusiasm; and we know beyond doubt that he could accept the historical ascendancy of Protestantism only when the enthusiasm had been washed out of it. At the end of the chapter he proclaims his allegiance to Erasmus and Arminius, Grotius and Locke, Limborch and Le Clerc: to “the Arminians of Holland” and “the latitudinarians of Cambridge” (6:128, n. 45), the founders of a rational and tolerant theology which permits the masses to believe as much, the clergy and magistracy as little as they choose, and restores the sceptical order of the Antonine enlightenment which preceded it. But Gibbon is unaware—or unwilling to recognise—how many of the Cambridge latitudinarians were Platonists.

“Yet the friends of Christianity are alarmed at the boundless impulse of inquiry and scepticism … by those men who preserve the name without the substance of religion”—the Word without the Flesh?—“the licence without the temper of philosophy.” And in a footnote: “I shall recommend to public animadversion two passages in Dr. Priestley which betray the ultimate tendency of his opinions. At the first of these”—Gibbon is citing the History of the Corruptions of Christianity—“the priest, at the second the magistrate, may tremble!” (6:128, n. 49). In Priestley's blend of scientific materialism with prophetic millennialism, the spirit of Gnosticism still walked; but Gibbon and his Europe had other forms of enthusiasm coming to them.

Notes

1. David Hume, “Of Superstition and Enthusiasm,” in T. H. Green and H. T. Grose, eds., The Philosophical Works of David Hume, 4 vols. (London: Longmans, Green, 1874-1875), 3: 144-49; The History of England, 8 vols. (Philadelphia: E. Parker, 1821), 2: 301, 483-84; 3: 55-57, 637.

2. Philosophical Works, 3: 145-49; History, 2: 462-63; 3: 58, 277, 323-24; “Appendix to the Reign of James I,” History, 3: 372-73, 477, 497, 654-56; 4: 88.

3. History, 3: 536-40, 189, 333, 548, 622-24, 644; 4: 2, 18-19, 47, 132, 147, 190.

4. Philosophical Works, 3: 149, and History, 4: 158-61.

5. See his Essai sur l'Etude de la Littérature, in John, Lord Sheffield, ed., Miscellaneous Works of Edward Gibbon (London: J. Murray, 1814), 4: 79-80. See also Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, ed. J. B. Bury, 7 vols. (London: Methuen, 1896-1900), Chap. 2, 1: 28-29. References in the text are to Bury's edition.

6. Decline and Fall, Chap. 28, 3: 205. Cf. “the easy nature of polytheism” (Chap. 3, 1:69); “how various, how loose, and how uncertain were the religious sentiments of the Polytheists” (Chap. 15, 2:55); “the universal toleration,” “the general indulgence of Polytheism” (Chap. 16, 2: 71, 73).

7. Hume, The Natural History of Religion, in Philosophical Works, 4: 301.

8. Margaret C. Jacob, The Radical Enlightenment: Pantheists, Freemasons, and Republicans (London: Allen Unwin, 1981).

9. Robert Darnton, Mesmerism and the End of the Enlightenment in France (Cambridge: Harvard University, 1968).

10. In the opinion of his latest biographer, they were not highly developed: Patricia Craddock, Young Edward Gibbon: Gentleman of Letters (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University, 1982), pp. 39, 200, 202-03.

11. For Stubbe, see the forthcoming work by James R. Jacob; for Toland, see Margaret C. Jacob, Radical Enlightenment, and Robert S. Sullivan, John Toland and the Deist Controversy (Cambridge: Harvard University, 1981).

12. Richard C. Westfall, Never at Rest: A Biography of Isaac Newton (Cambridge: Cambridge University, 1980).

13. Philosophical Works, 4: 334-36, and Decline and Fall, Chap. 28, 3: 214-15.

14. “a Julian or Semiramis may reign in the North” (Chap. 38, 4: 165) pairs Frederick of Prussia with Catherine of Russia.

15. See three articles by J. G. A. Pocock: “Between Machiavelli and Hume: Gibbon as Civic Humanist and Philosophical Historian,” in Glenn W. Bowersock, John Clive, and Stephen R. Graubard, eds., Edward Gibbon and the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (Cambridge: Harvard University, 1977); “Gibbon's Decline and Fall and the World View of the Late Enlightenment,” Eighteenth-Century Studies, 10: 287-303; and “Gibbon and the Shepherds: The Stages of Society in the Decline and Fall,” History of European Ideas, 2, no. 3 (Oxford: Pergamon, 1981,): 193-202.

16. See the “General Observations on the Fall of the Roman Empire in the West,” passim.

17. “Antiquities of the House of Brunswick,” in Miscellaneous Works, 3: 353-554.

18. Edmund Burke, “Letters on a Regicide Peace,” in The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, ed. W. King and F. Laurence, 8 vols. (London: Rivington, 1792-1827), 8: 255.