SOURCE: Jemielity, Thomas. “Gibbon Among the Aeolists: Islamic Credulity and Pagan Fanaticism in The Decline and Fall.” Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 19 (1989): 165-83.

[In the following essay, Jemielity argues that although many critics have commented on the satire directed at Christianity in the Decline and Fall, in fact the historian attacked forms of superstition and religious zeal in other religions, ranging from paganism to Islam.]

James Boswell is only one of the earliest to allege that insidious and dishonest motives prompt Edward Gibbon's analysis of Christianity in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Although the Life of Johnson, admittedly, does not appear until 1791, that 20 March 1776 conversation which impugns Gibbon's integrity is in the biography but a reshaping for public view of doubts Boswell had expressed at Oxford about Gibbon's recently published history that winter. In the Life Boswell refers to the Decline and Fall as a work “which, under the pretext of another subject, contained much artful infidelity.”¹ Were we to believe Boswell, Gibbon, in a seventy-one-chapter history spanning almost two millennia, constructs only a facade behind which lurks his real objective: an infidel's attack on Christianity. Characteristically Boswellian, it is no small fantasy. Such an exclusive focussing, however, on what Gibbon says about Christianity obscures—as it does in Boswell's case—the consistency with which Gibbon treats all religion, and all abuses of religion, be it Christianity or Judaism, Islam or various forms of paganism. Principles announced and implied in the General Observations on the Fall of the Roman Empire in the West and introduced as well in discussing, in chapter 2, the Antonine emperors' policy on religion guide Gibbon's treatment in the history of all faiths and their excesses.² The main criteria which emerge from these two sections of the Decline and Fall are the following: first, Gibbon's uneasiness with an other-worldly concern in religions that frequently and sometimes recklessly disregards the this-worldly consequences of belief; second, his dislike for any form of religious intolerance and his preference for the tolerant policy of the Antonines; third, his suspicion about the ease with which credulity and zeal, superstition and fanaticism, can undermine any form of religious faith and, indeed, be exploited for reasons that have little to do with religion. The enlightened of his time, Gibbon hopes and implies, will, like the Antonine intelligentsia, effectively resist the divisive social and political consequences caused by excessive attachment to any single faith.

I

Completed sometime before the accession of Louis XVI in 1774,³ the General Observations embody the philosophic historian's attempt to determine how “this awful revolution may be usefully applied to the instruction of this present age.”⁴ Echoes of Antonine religious policy in the second century, however, frequently form a counterpoint to these comments. A single, lengthy, and packed paragraph analyzes the predominantly, but not wholly, adverse effect that “the introduction, or at least the abuse [my emphasis] of Christianity” had on the fall of Rome. By emphatically noting at the outset that “the happiness of a future life [Gibbon's emphasis] is the great object of religion” (DF, 4:162), Gibbon encapsulates a major cause of his displeasure with the sometimes reckless this-worldly consequences of celestially oriented religious practice and belief, a major thrust of his indictment of Christianity in chapter 15. The Antonines, by contrast, locate their ethical concerns and responsibilities in the world of human beings, and follow the Greek philosophers who “deduced their morals from the nature of man rather than from that of God” (DF, 1:30). By contrast, chapter 15 asserts, “it was not in this world [Gibbon's emphasis again] that the primitive Christians were desirous of making themselves either agreeable or useful” (DF, 2:35). Gibbon's emphatic contrasts between “this world” and “a future life” highlight his conviction that whoever can make two ears of corn or two blades of grass to grow upon a spot where only one grew before will deserve better of mankind than the whole race of priests and theologians put together. The General Observations censure the adverse social and political consequences of Christianity; they praise, but not enthusiastically, some beneficent public effects of its practice; and they note the theological discord that allowed “the more earthly passions of malice and ambition” to vitiate the supposed promptings of “faith, zeal, [and] curiosity” (DF, 4:163). The later discussion of the state of Rome from the twelfth century on occasions a reference to ambition as “a weed of quick and early vegetation in the vineyard of Christ” (DF, 7:238). The context speaks of “the votes, the venality, [and] the violence” of the popular election of the Popes over a nine-century period, an abuse particularly troublesome in the absence of a civil magistrate who could lessen the effects of controversy. Yet the Observations are not pleased with the frequency that theological discord diverted the attention of the emperors “from camps to synods” (DF, 4:163). For “the church, and even the state,” Gibbon continues, “were distracted by religious factions, whose conflicts were sometimes bloody, and always implacable” (DF, 4:163). The separation of civil and ecclesiastical authority, with each one claiming real power and the church insisting on its greater power (see DF, 2:318), helped prepare the way for “a new species of tyranny” that is, the ecclesiastical. Both forms of despotism, however, as Gibbon comments in chapter 53, are “more permanent evils” than “the calamities of war” (DF, 6:68).

The religious picture in the General Observations strikingly contrasts with that of Antonine Rome. The prevailing modes of worship there “were all considered by the people as equally true, by the philosopher as equally false, and by the magistrate as equally useful,” a toleration effecting “mutual indulgence [and] even religious concord” (DF, 1:29). Likewise, Roman religion was neither embittered by theological dispute nor monolithically confined to any obligatory system, very unlike the later and extensively developed divisive intra- and inter-fraternal conflicts among the Christians and among the exclusive Jews.⁵ Rome's “devout polytheist,” fondly attached to his national rites, nevertheless admitted “the different religions of the earth” (DF, 1:29). Gibbon twice insists on this national quality in a more tolerant paganism, for the Antonine magistrates, he later observes, “were convinced that the various modes of worship contributed alike to the same salutary purposes; and that, in every country, the form of superstition which had received the sanction of time and experience was the best adapted to the climate and to its inhabitants” (DF, 1:31). This principle anticipates Gibbon's later use, especially in the second half of the history, of the common Protestant refusal to recognize any religious authority transcending national boundaries and to accept, rather, in the language of article 34, “the diversities of countries, times, and men's manners.” Gibbon's analysis of the Paulician heresy in chapter 54 asserts this diversity at least as historical fact: “In the profession of Christianity,” he writes, “the variety of national characters may be clearly distinguished” (DF, 6:110). “Such was the mild spirit of antiquity,” the Antonine resumé claims, “that the nations were less attentive to the difference than to the resemblance of their religious worship” (DF, 1:29).

A comment very germane, however, to his later explicit concern in the Observations with the instructive value of the story of Rome's decline and fall concerns the attitude of the intelligentsia towards the religious rites in which they participate, in Antonine Rome, an “external reverence” that masks “an inward contempt”: “Viewing with a smile of pity and indulgence the various errors of the vulgar, [the philosophers] diligently practised the ceremonies of their fathers, devoutly frequented the temples of the gods; and, sometimes condescending to act a part on the theater of superstition, they concealed the sentiments of an Atheist under the sacerdotal robes” (DF, 1:31). Although “Atheist” not at all accurately epitomizes Gibbon's religious views, is Gibbon implying here that an educated person in his time, unwilling to offend the credulity of the ignorant, will regard the mythology of eighteenth-century Europe with the same contempt and ideological indifference that characterized the pagan intelligentsia in Antonine Rome? The likelihood of such an ethical hint is strengthened by the way in which Gibbon discusses the instructive value of the history in the General Observations.

Eighteenth-century Europe, these Observations strongly imply, is a much improved reappearance of the power, stability, and humane administration of Antonine Rome, coupled with the exemplary public ideals and virtues of the Roman Republic.⁶ Significantly, Gibbon sees his Europe precisely as a republic—one of his most complimentary political terms—“one great republic, whose various inhabitants have attained almost the same level of politeness and cultivation” (DF, 4:163). As a republic of independent states Europe operates within a continental system of checks and balances, the system that had been substantively eroded in the Empire as early as Augustus. Strikingly, the General Observations omit one possible contemporary threat to this “one great republic,” the religion that helped to undermine and level the Roman Empire. But Gibbon has made his contemporary point implicitly in both chapter 2 and in the Observations: namely, that eighteenth-century Europe, most likely free of the threats of barbarism and despotism, can also be relatively free of a superstitious and enthusiastic abuse of Christianity. The enlightened of his time, Gibbon hopes and implies, will effectively resist the divisive political and social consequences of zealous and excessive attachment to any single form of faith. Europe will live as comfortably with its Christianities as Rome lived with her paganisms.

II

The application to Christianity of the evaluative norms and principles of the General Observations and of chapter 2 is a familiar story. Less familiar, perhaps, is the consistency and degree to which Gibbon thinks comparably about religions other than Christianity and Judaism in the Decline and Fall. Any religion introduced into the history, first of all, appears always for the same reason: because its fortunes somehow influenced the fortunes of the Roman Empire. The religions that enter the history also permit Gibbon to provide a comparative study of the civil and ecclesiastical orders, which so often intersect in the course of his narrative. If, for example, chapters 15 and 16 appear to explain how the “pure and humble religion” of Christianity, which “grew up in silence and obscurity,” finally erected “the triumphant banner of the cross on the ruins of the Capitol” (DF, 2:7), Zoroastrianism enters the narrative in chapter 8 “to illustrate many of [Persia's] most important transactions … with the Roman Empire” (DF, 1:198). Islam deserves attention because “the genius of the Arabian prophet [that is, Mohammed], the manners of his nation, and the spirit of his religion involve the cause of the decline and fall of the Eastern empire …” (DF, 5:311). Julian's paganism is not irrelevant to the historian because “the phantoms which existed only in the mind of the emperor had a real and pernicious effect on the government of the empire” (DF, 2:432). When Gibbon, therefore, comments that several centuries of “spiritual wars” in the East did “so deeply … affect the decline and fall of the empire that the historian has too often been compelled to attend the synods, to explore the creeds, and to enumerate the sects, of this busy period of ecclesiatical annals” (DF, 6:110), he is merely applying specifically a principle of inclusion apparent throughout the Decline and Fall. Gibbon recognizes religion as a cultural and historical force and often directs a historian's curiosity at the way it conducts itself as an institution. Christianity receives the most attention in the history because it had the greatest effect on the Empire.

1. THE RELIGION OF ZOROASTER

The first specific creed Gibbon analyzes in the Decline and Fall is Zoroastrianism, the religion of Persia. The brief commentary in chapter 8 revealingly anticipates the longer discussion of Christianity in chapters 15 and 16. The Magian religion, as Gibbon calls it, arose out of the mutual adopting and corrupting of the superstitions of Europe and Asia. However revered the memory of Zoroaster, “the obsolete and mysterious language” of his ZendAvesta provided a mischievously fertile opportunity for the Magian interpreters, who deconstructed, we might say, the ZendAvesta into seventy sects, “all equally derided by a crowd of infidels” (DF, 1:197-98). Artaxerxes' desire to secure religious unity by a general council of the wisest of the Magi unexpectedly led to the almost insurmountable and unmanageable presence of about eighty thousand Magi “from all parts of his dominions,” a number Gibbon quietly acknowledges to be not very amenable either to “the authority of reason” or “the art of policy” (DF, 1:198). But having “so long sighed in contempt and obscurity,” the Magi “obeyed the welcome summons” into the limelight. Like a competition, an elimination process reduced the participating Magi in stages from eighty thousand, to forty thousand, to four thousand, to four hundred, to forty, and at last to seven. As the result of a most convenient vision,⁷ one of these Magi, Erdaviraph, fixed “the articles of the faith of Zoroaster … with equal authority and precision.” “Supernatural evidence,” encouraged by “three cups of soporiferous wine,” had silenced every doubt (DF, 1:198). For Erdaviraph's vision had transported him to heaven to discuss the issues directly with the deity.⁸

The analysis of the Zoroastrian body of belief notes that the Persian religion condemns all unbelievers to the “infernal enemy,” Ahriman, who, along with his followers, will sink at the last into “native darkness” while “virtue will maintain the eternal peace and harmony of the universe” (DF, 1:199). Zoroaster's was a theology “darkly comprehended by foreigners, and even by the far greater number of his disciples”—no inside advantages here. But the “philosophic simplicity” of the faith struck even “the most careless observers” and drew specific comment from Herodotus, which Gibbon quotes (DF, 1:200). In this context, Gibbon explicitly announces two constituent principles of all religion, worship and ethics: “Every mode of religion, to make a deep and lasting impression on the human mind, must exercise our obedience by enjoining practices of devotion, for which we can assign no reason; and must acquire our esteem, by inculcating moral duties analogous to the dictates of our own hearts” (DF, 1: 200).

Significantly, Gibbon does not here mention creed, the body of belief that forms part of the customary religious trio of creed, code, and cult. The cult of Zoroastrianism Gibbon treats ironically: the “mysterious girdle” provided to the faithful Persian at puberty; the “peculiar prayers, ejaculations, or genuflexions” that accompanied “the most indifferent or the most necessary” actions of human life. A footnote mentions the fifteen genuflections, prayers, and the like required before cutting one's nails or urinating. However much Gibbon undercuts these cultic practices—for which, remember, he admits no rational explanation possible—he speaks very approvingly of the this-worldly concern of Zoroaster, as he “lays aside the prophet, assumes the legislator, and discovers a liberal concern for private and public happiness, seldom to be found among the grovelling or visionary schemes of superstition” (DF, 1:201). Zoroastrianism abhors fasting and celibacy. The Magian saint, Gibbon notes, “is obliged to beget children, to plant useful trees, to destroy noxious animals, to convey water to the dry lands of Persia, and to work out his salvation by pursuing all the labours of agriculture.” This injunction Gibbon reinforces with the text of the ZendAvesta itself: “He who sows the ground with care and diligence acquires a greater stock of religious merit than he could gain by the repetition of ten thousand prayers” (DF, 1:201). Obviously, the Zoroastrians were very desirous of making themselves agreeable and useful in this world. What went wrong, Gibbon asks? Why did Zoroastrianism fail to achieve a place with the most exemplary religious and ethical systems? Apart from the “motley composition” of “reason and passion, … enthusiasm and … selfish motives,” the “useful and sublime truths” of Zoroaster were corrupted by “the most abject and dangerous superstition” (DF, 1:201-2). The priesthood of the Persian Magi bear a major responsibility for this prostitution. An “extremely numerous” order, the Magi enjoyed “very considerable” property. “Besides the less invidious possession of a large tract of the most fertile lands of Media, they levied a general tax on the fortunes and the industry of the Persians.” Zoroaster himself, “the interested prophet,” as Gibbon calls him, indispensably required tithes to make salvifically profitable the good works of believers. Magi who demanded hefty fees guarded the doors of salvation. Because the Magi “were the masters of education in Persia” (DF, 1:202, they exercised enormous influence. Indeed, “the administration of Artaxerxes was in a great measure directed by the counsels of the sacerdotal order” (DF, 1:203). Artaxerxes prohibited as well the exercise of any other form of religion, “a spirit of persecution which reflects dishonour on the religion of Zoroaster.” If Gibbon is less censorious of this intolerance than usual, it is only because “it was not productive of any civil commotion.” In fact, it strengthened the monarchy “by uniting all the various inhabitants of Persia in the bands of religious zeal” (DF, 1:203). This picture of Zoroastrianism in chapter 8 anticipates in many respects what Gibbon will shortly say about the introduction and triumph of Christianity in the Empire. That story will introduce characters and situations familiar from the tale of Zoroastrianism: deluded or ambiguously motivated civil administrators; clergy banefully influenced by authority and notoriety; specious but seasonal supernatural claim and evidence; and the ubiquitous and finally corrupting force of power and wealth.

The credulousness Gibbon wittily exposes in Zoroastrianism, like its counterpart in other faiths, constitutes a steadfast focus in the Decline and Fall: that “easiness of belief,” as Samuel Johnson defines it, which effectively and cumulatively—for believers—asserts the frequency of supposedly tangible divine favor and intervention in human affairs. Such “prodigies” and “miracles” David Hume numbers in The Natural History of Religion as among those which “impress mankind with the strongest sentiments of religion. Madness, fury, rage, and an inflamed imagination,” he ironically asserts, are “often supposed to be the only dispositions, in which we can have any immediate communication with the Deity.”⁹ Gibbon very approvingly refers to this most important source of his own principles of religious analysis, for the first time, in fact, when he takes up the distinctive features of paganism in chapter 2, where he calls The Natural History of Religion “the best commentary” on “the true genius of Polytheism” (DF, 1:29 n. 3). Like Hume, Gibbon exposes the self-gratifying attraction of a theology that defies common sense and reason to offer more exciting alternatives instead: “Amazement must of necessity be raised [Hume writes]: Mystery affected: Darkness and obscurity sought after: And a foundation of merit afforded to the devout votaries, who desire an opportunity of subduing their rebellious reason, by the belief of the most unintelligible sophisms.”¹⁰

Gibbon's attack on credulity, it might be noted here, reflects a generic or formal requirement on his part: he is writing the history of Rome, not its romance. When the history of religion intersects the history of the Empire, Gibbon likewise seeks to penetrate the mists and shadows, the specters and the apparitions, that so easily enter and obfuscate the annals of belief. Credulity multiplies wonder. It transforms the record of religion into romance, that strange, wild tale of adventure, that chronicle of the mysterious and the preternatural peopled with lesser deities of every sort. As Gibbon challenges the romances of religion, the eery preternatural claims and qualities of their minor deities—saints, magi, priests, dervishes, and the like—come into the less easily deceived light of history to punctuate the awareness that romance also denotes the lie and the merely imaginary, the wished for rather than what was or is. What appears sometimes as an almost casually thrown off distinction—Gibbon refers in a note, for instance, to “the history or romance” of Gregory Thaumaturgus (DF, 6:116 n. 17)—actually highlights his ongoing effort to separate fact from fiction even in the annals of belief and his neverfailing sense of how conveniently but perhaps necessarily religions can and must set their most extraordinary claims in the past. If in chapter 15, for example, he ironically exposes the credulity of the Jews of the Second Temple who believed in the Mosaic miracles which Moses' own contemporaries rejected, he later draws attention to the romantic allure of the witness-free past to locate the marvelous: “such is the progress of credulity,” Gibbon remarks, in chapter 58, while speaking of the First Crusade, “that miracles, most doubtful on the spot and at the moment, will be received with implicit faith at a convenient distance of time and space” (DF, 6:306). Religion, or its abuse, has an almost inescapable penchant for romance, which, in the Decline and Fall, receives a historian's sceptical and frequently witty analysis. To the believers who listen with credulity to the whispers of religious fancy, who pursue with eagerness the phantoms of faith, who create a marvel-filled past to reassure the present, Gibbon asks them to attend to the history of religions in the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

2. THE RELIGION OF MOHAMMED

Islam's view of the afterlife draws considerable emphasis in the lengthy discussion of Mohammedanism in chapter 50. Gibbon's concern here focusses on the credulousness of next-worldly expectations. The Decline and Fall at least twice asserts the futility of such speculations about a next life, briefly, for instance, when it asserts that the theologians arguing about the nature of purgatory at the Council of Ferrara were seeking to resolve “a doubtful point, which in a few years might be conveniently settled on the spot by the disputants” (DF, 7:109). The lengthier analysis of immortality occurs in chapter 15 where Gibbon argues the moral irrelevance of the belief for the ethics and ethical sanctions of paganism and the absence of the belief among the Jews (DF, 2:19-28). Here, too, Gibbon asserts that only “a divine revelation” can confirm the existence or describe the qualities of an afterlife (DF, 2:19-20).¹¹ Irony, however, makes the detailed picture of Islamic immortality, like that of Christianity, appear more the product of wish-fulfillment than that of revelation.

Like the Christianity which has learned over “the revolution of seventeen centuries … not to press too closely the mysterious language of prophecy and revelation” about the end of time (DF, 2:23), so too the prudent Mohammed “has not presumed to determine the moment of that awful catastrophe, though he darkly announces the signs, both in heaven and earth, which will precede the universal dissolution …” (DF, 5:348-49). Here Gibbon again affirms the difficulty of determining “the intermediate state of the soul” as it awaits reunion with the flesh. Mohammed's picture of the final judgment uses the metaphors of “an earthly tribunal.” Non-believers are universally damned: “the greater part of mankind,” Gibbon states in revealing contrast, are “condemned for their opinions [my emphasis],” while only true believers “will be judged by their actions [my emphasis]” (DF, 5:350). However long sinful believers must suffer, eventually all of them will be saved. Like Christianity, Islam has its ideological requirements, its ideological purities, and its ideological guarantees.

The religiously familiar natural imagery¹² in Islam's description of the heavenly paradise disdains “a liberal taste for harmony and science, conversation and friendship.” Instead, the prophet, says Gibbon,

idly celebrates the pearls and diamonds, the robes of silk, palaces of marble, dishes of gold, rich wines, artificial dainties, numerous attendants, and the whole train of sensual and costly luxury, which becomes insipid to the owner, even in the short period of this mortal life. Seventy-two Houris, or blackeyed girls of resplendent beauty, blooming youth, virgin purity, and exquisite sensibility, will be created for the use of the meanest believer; a moment of pleasure will be prolonged to a thousand years, and his faculties will be increased an hundred-fold, to render him worthy of his felicity.

(DF, 5:35)

Gibbon's brief interjection into this picture posits psychological impossibility along with theological unlikelihood. Although this paradise welcomes men and women, Mohammed “has not specified the male companions of the female elect, lest he should either alarm the jealousy of their former husbands or disturb their felicity by the suspicion of an everlasting marriage.”¹³ However much embarrassed Mohammedanism allegorizes this picture to escape its blunt sensuality, Gibbon assumes a literal intention and a literal reading. He does add, though, that “the prophet has expressly declared that all meaner happiness will be forgotten and despised by the saints and martyrs, who shall be admitted to the beatitude of the divine vision” (DF, 5:351).

That Gibbon should so ironically deprecate the sensuality of the Mohammedan afterlife testifies to the judicious discrimination of his religious analyses because he speaks very favorably of many features of Islam. He admires, for example, its greater toleration.¹⁴ The summary judgment of the Moslem creed is highly complimentary: “more pure than the system of Zoroaster, more liberal than the law of Moses, … [and] less inconsistent with reason than the creed of mystery and superstition which, in the seventh century, disgraced the simplicity of the gospel” (DF, 5:487).

The concern in chapter 51 with Islamic practice towards non-believers concludes a long account of the fortunes of Arabia after the death of Mohammed in a.d. 632. The preceding chapter's more personally focussed look at Mohammed himself—with the founder rather than the faith—saves for the last the “beneficial or pernicious influence on the public happiness” of “the character of Mahomet” (DF, 5:395). Whatever limitations Gibbon acknowledges in Mohammed's proselytizing, he also observes that the prophet “breathed among the faithful a spirit of charity and friendship, recommended the practice of the social virtues, and checked, by his laws and precepts, the thirst of revenge and the oppression of widows and orphans” (DF, 5:396).

Such complimentary judgments do not preclude the incisive, ambiguous analysis of the character of Mohammed, an analysis that raises as many doubts as the supposedly neutral consideration of the five causes of Christianity. Gibbon finds it difficult “at the distance of twelve centuries … [to] darkly contemplate [Mohammed's] shade through a cloud of religious incense” (DF, 5:397), a major cause of obfuscation in religious and ecclesiastical annals. “Could I truly delineate the portrait of an hour, the fleeting resemblance,” he suspects, “would not equally apply to the solitary of mount Hera, to the preacher of Mecca, and to the conqueror of Arabia” (DF, 5:375). The character analysis that follows refuses to resolve antitheses and moral ambiguities, and along its way even takes a glancing shot at the credulity of no less a figure than Socrates. Speaking of Mohammed, Gibbon writes:

It was duty of a man and a citizen to impart the doctrine of salvation, to rescue his country from the dominion of sin and error. The energy of a mind incessantly bent on the same object would convert a general obligation into a particular call; the warm suggestings of the understanding or the fancy would be felt as the inspirations of heaven; the labour of thought would expire in rapture and vision; and the inward sensation, the invisible monitor, would be described with the form and attributes of an angel of God. From enthusiasm to imposture the step is perilous and slippery; the daemon of Socrates affords a memorable instance, how a wise man may deceive himself, how a good man may deceive others, how the conscience may slumber in a mixed and middle state between self-illusion and voluntary fraud.

(DF, 5:376)

This antithetical march continues through the career of Mohammed. “Of his last years,” Gibbon then notes, “ambition was the ruling passion; and a politician will suspect that he secretly smiled (the victorious imposter!) at the enthusiasm of his youth and the credulity of his proselytes” (DF, 5:377). The Mohammed appearing here as “the victorious impostor” is elsewhere “an eloquent fanatic” (DF, 5:394), founder of a religion whose fanatics, “like our fanatics of the last century, … spoke the language of their [Gibbon's emphasis] scriptures” (DF, 5:420 n. 66).

A historian as conscious as Gibbon of the questionable, legendary accretions to what he believes the basically simple life of Jesus,¹⁵ not surprisingly recognizes the credulity that adds wonder to the life of Mohammed. Once again, the romance of religion is at work:

The votaries of Mahomet are more assured than himself of his miraculous gifts,¹⁶ and their confidence and credulity increase as they are farther removed from the time and place of his spiritual exploits. They believe or affirm that trees went forth to meet him; that he was saluted by stones; that water gushed from his fingers; that he fed the hungry, cured the sick, and raised the dead; that a beam groaned to him; that a camel complained to him; that a shoulder of mutton informed him of its being poisoned; and that both animate and inanimate nature were equally subject to the apostle of God.

(DG, 5:344)

At least in the eyes of believers, “the sword of Mahomet was not less potent than the rod of Moses” (DF, 5:346). Competition has its role to play in credulity.

Credulity, thirdly, commonly assumes unusual physical attractiveness in its religious founders. Mohammed, so the believer was pleased to affirm, “was distinguished by the beauty of his person, an outward gift which is seldom despised,” says Gibbon, momentarily betraying the reader, “except by those to whom it has been refused” (DF, 5:335). His father, Abdallah, had been “the most beautiful and modest of Arabian youth; and, in the first night, when he consummated his marriage with Amina [Mohammed's mother], … two hundred virgins are said to have expired of jealousy and despair” (DF, 5:334).

The footnotes in which Gibbon wages so many of his battles with Christianity's romances are an important theater of encounter with the ease and expanse of Moslem romance. Like the footnotes on Christian excess, these too are often of a sexual nature. Philip Guedella, we recall, once joked that Gibbon lived out his sex life in his footnotes.¹⁷ Certainly a number of those notes on Mohammedanism create the impression of a brief, in camera indulgence from which Gibbon returns to the public, composed chamber of the text. Notice, for instance, how Gibbon handles the alleged incontinence of the prophet. Perhaps, the historian speculates, this imputation “may be palliated by the tradition of his natural or preternatural gifts: he united the manly virtue of thirty of the children of Adam; and the apostle might rival the thirteenth labour of the Grecian Hercules” (DF, 5:380). What sexual frenzy impels Gibbon not to one, but three footnotes on this brief text that make clear the sexual nature of these “natural or preternatural gifts,” the very physical manifestation of this “manly virtue”? The documentary Dionysian, intriguingly, adopts in the first note the modest disguise of Latin and, in the second note, the equally chaste cover of Greek. But in the third and final note, Gibbon's wild abandon casts off all restraint and appears in the transparent and nakedly revealing veils of his native English.

The first note (DF, 5:380 n. 175) passes on the claim that the prophet could satisfy as many as eleven women in one hour, repeats, secondly, the testimony of Al Jannabi that Mohammed “surpassed all men in conjugal vigour,” and concludes with the astonishment of the Ali who washed the prophet's body after his death: “Beyond doubt, O prophet,” the wondering Ali exclaims, “your penis is elevated towards the heavens.” Modestly, of course, Gibbon hints here at one of the hitherto unconsidered attractions of a career in the mortuary arts. The second note (DF, 5:380 n. 176) borrows “the style” of Church Father Gregory Nazianzen in alluding to Hercules' thirteenth challenge, which the final footnote in the trio identifies as “the common and most glorious legend [that] includes, in a single night, the fifty victories of Hercules over the virgin daughters of Thestius.” In something of a kill-joy moment, editor J. B. Bury denies that Gibbon's source says, “‘in a single night.’” Gibbon, however, mentions a scholarly controversy about the duration of Hercules' performance: “Atheneaeus allows seven nights,” he mock-solemnly observes, “and Apollodorus fifty, for this arduous achievement of Hercules, who was then no more than eighteen years of age.”¹⁸ However much scholarship will controvert the duration of this triumph, it can unanimously agree that here at least is the one section of the Decline and Fall that James Boswell read with admiration, envy, and, dare I say it, credulity.

3. THE RELIGION OF JULIAN

The most prominent enthusiast in the Decline and Fall is the pagan emperor Julian, nephew of Constantine. If history provides Gibbon enough material to fashion his own Tale of a Tub on superstition, his Julian strikingly resembles the enthusiast Jack in Swift's Tale.¹⁹ In The Literary Art of Edward Gibbon Harold Bond points out that the twenty-month reign of Julian occupies “three of Gibbon's most stirring chapters” because he embodied “part of the great spirit of Rome” interred with him at his death.²⁰ True, but one of these three chapters is wholly given over to Julian's religion in an analysis that makes clear how little the emperor's fanaticism and intolerance revealed anything of the lightly worn paganism of the Antonine emperors. Julian's was a most uncharacteristic zeal for the pagan gods.

Like Swift's Jack, Julian's imagination “was susceptible of the most lively impressions” (DF, 2:433). Julian, however, was a Jack with power, and so “the phantoms which existed only in the mind of the emperor had a real and pernicious effect on the government of the empire” (DF, 2:432). Julian's “voluntary offering of his reason on the altars of Jupiter and Apollo” (DF, 2:436) took the specific form of a fascination with the occult which allowed him to come under the baneful influence of fanatic pagan philosophers, one of whom, Maximus, initiates the twenty-year-old Julian at Ephesus into the mysteries of Eleusis:

As these ceremonies were performed in the depth of caverns, and in the silence of the night, and as the inviolable secret of the mysteries was preserved by the discretion of the initiated, I shall not presume to describe the horrid sounds and fiery apparitions, which were presented to the senses, or the imagination, of the credulous aspirant, till the visions of comfort and knowledge broke upon him in a blaze of celestial light. In the caverns of Ephesus and Eleusis, the mind of Julian was penetrated with a sincere, deep, and unalterable enthusiasm; though he might sometimes exhibit the vicissitudes of pious fraud and hypocrisy, which may be observed, or at least suspected, in the character of the most conscientious fanatics. From that moment he consecrated his life to the service of the gods.

(DF, 2:440-41)

Julian fasted to prepare himself “for the frequent and familiar visits with which he was honoured by the celestial powers.” A conveniently credulous disciple, in Gibbon a ubiquitous religious phenomenon, records that Julian

lived in a perpetual intercourse with the gods and goddesses; that they descended upon earth, to enjoy the conversation of their favourite hero; that they gently interrupted his slumbers, by touching his hand or his hair; that they warned him of every impending danger, and conducted him, by their infallible wisdom, in every action of his life; and that he had such an intimate knowledge of his heavenly guests, as readily to distinguish the voice of Jupiter from that of Minerva, and the form of Apollo from the figure of Hercules.

(DF, 2:441)

Publicly Christian, at least initially, Julian returned privately to his pagan devotions “with the impatience of a lover” (DF, 2:443). In no meaningless gesture, he marked his accession by assuming “the character of the supreme pontiff” (DF, 2:445-46) and performed in pagan liturgies “the meanest offices which contributed to the worship of the gods”: “It was the business of the emperor to bring the wood, to blow the fire, to handle the knife, to slaughter the victim, and, thrusting his hand into the bowels of the expiring animal, to draw forth the heart or liver, and to read, with the consummate skill of an haruspex, the imaginary signs of future events” (DF, 2: 446).

The public consequences of such an attachment were ominous. Sycophantic civil administrators who knew how to read between the lines of an apparent policy of toleration and equal treatment knew that they risked no real danger by ignoring the dictates and observing the wishes of their sovereign:

In the exercise of arbitrary power [Gibbon writes], [the provincial ministers of his authority] consulted the wishes, rather than the commands, of their sovereign; and ventured to exercise a secret and vexations tyranny against the sectaries, on whom they were not permitted to confer the honours of martyrdom. The emperor, who dissembled as long as possible his knowledge of the injustice that was exercised in his name, expressed his real sense of the conduct of his officers by gentle reproofs and substantial rewards.

(DF, 2:463)

A passage as darkly modern as any in the entire Decline and Fall. Julian, in fine, constructed and encouraged an “artful system by which [he] proposed to obtain the effects, without incurring the guilt, or reproach, of persecution” (DF, 2:476). The chapter-long analysis of the emperor's religion concludes with the ominous speculation that if Julian had lived longer and continued his real policy against Christianity, “he must have involved his country in the horrors of a civil war” (DF, 2:478).

One incident from the history of Julian nicely captures Gibbon's amusement at the fanatical excesses of Julian's faith. The historian relates how Julian hastened “to adore the Apollo of Daphne” with a devotion “raised to the highest pitch of eagerness and impatience.” As he allowed his fancy to run wild with thoughts of a splendid liturgy at Antioch, Gibbon writes that Julian's “lively imagination anticipated the grateful pomp of victims, of libations, and of incense; a long procession of youths and virgins, clothed in white robes, the symbol of their innocence; and the tumultuous concourse of an innumerable people” (DF, 2:467). Julian's frenzy overlooked the fact that with the establishment of Christianity the temple of Apollo at Antioch had fallen into some desuetude:

Instead of hecatombs of fat oxen sacrificed by the tribes of a wealthy city to their tutelar deity, the emperor complains that he found only a single goose, provided at the expense of a priest, the pale and solitary inhabitant of this decayed temple [who? the goose or the priest?]. The altar was deserted, the oracle had been reduced to silence, and the holy ground was profaned by the introduction of Christian and funereal rites.

(DF, 2:467)

The temple proved not to be the best of all possible fanes. To adapt a phrase from Jaroslav Pelikan's very recently published The Excellent Empire, credulity and zeal, any of the excesses of superstition and enthusiasm, are in Edward Gibbon “a thoroughly ecumenical phenomenon.”²¹

Notes

1. See Boswell's Life of Johnson, Together with Boswell's Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides and Johnson's Diary of a Journey into North Wales, ed. George Birkbeck Hill, rev. L. F. Powell (Oxford: Clarendon, 1934), 2:447-48. See also Boswell: The Ominous Years, 1774-1776, eds. Charles Ryskamp and Frederick A. Pottle (Melbourne: Heinemann, 1963), 282.

   One of the definitions Johnson provides for artful is cunning, and his definitions of the second term could constitute a verbal arsenal of charges levelled against Gibbon: “Artifice; deceit; sliness; sleight; craft; subtilty; dissimulation; fraudulent dexterity.” The citation from Bacon underscores the ethical imputation of the term: “We take cunning for a sinister or crooked wisdom; and certainly there is a great difference between a cunning man and a wise man, not only in point of honesty, but in point of ability.”

2. A third, very important source of Gibbon's religious assumptions appears in chapter 54, the study of the Paulician heresy from which Gibbon traces the Protestant Reformation in the European Renaissance. I will be directly concerned with those assumptions, however, in a separate but related study on the Protestantism of many of the principles Gibbon employs in the Decline and Fall.

3. Louis XVI believed that references to Arcadius or Honorius in the General Observations (DF, 4:165) unflatteringly alluded to him. In his Memoirs, however, Gibbon states: “I am ready to declare that the concluding observations of my third Volume were written before his accession to the throne.” See Edward Gibbon, Memoirs of My Life, ed. Georges Bonnard (London: Nelson, 1966), 175.

4. Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, ed., intro., nn., app., and ind. J. B. Bury (London: Methuen, 1896-1900), 4:163. hereafter incorporated into the text as DF.

5. Gibbon's footnote states that “the Christians as well as the Jews … formed a very important exception” to this Antonine policy of toleration, “so important, indeed,” Gibbon alerts the reader, “that the discussion will require a distinct chapter of this work.” See DF, 1:29 n. 3. Gibbon's later analysis of the zeal of the Jews and the early Christians repeatedly emphasizes the intolerance of both religious groups. See DF, 2:2-19.

6. The role of the ideals of the Roman Republic of Gibbon's history is a major theme in Harold L. Bond, The Literary Art of Edward Gibbon (Oxford: Clarendon, 1960). See also Lewis P. Curtis, “Gibbon's Paradise Lost,” in The Age of Johnson: Essays Presented to Chauncey Brewster Tinker, ed. Frederick W. Hilles, intro. Wilmarth S. Lewis (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1949), 73-90. Patricia Craddock has cautioned me about the reservations Gibbon expresses for the expansionist policies of the Republic and about its treatment of women and slaves.

7. Gibbon speaks in chapter 52 of “seasonable vision” and adds: “for such are the manufacture of every religion.” See DF, 6:4.

8. Richard N. Parkinson provides a delightful analysis of what he calls in this passage some of Gibbon's “finest comic irony” in the first of the historian's attacks “upon unreason in religion.” See Edward Gibbon (New York: Twayne, 1973), 50-52.

9. David Hume, The Natural History of Religion, ed. and intro. H. E. Root (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1957), 42. Hereafter referred to as NHR, 54.

10. NHR, 54.

11. Gibbon's analysis of the belief in an afterlife shrewdly uncovers the vanity that prompts the human refusal to accept annihilation as the ultimate human destiny. In a stimulating contemporary study, Ernest Becker advances the thesis that “the idea of death, the fear of it, haunts the human animal like nothing else; it is a mainspring of human activity—activity designed largely to avoid the fatality of death, to overcome it by denying in some way that it is the final destiny for man.” See The Denial of Death (New York: Macmillan [The Free Press]), 1973, ix.

12. In chapter 15, Gibbon describes a Christian counterpart to such paradisiacal expectation, this one, the earth-located blissful kingdom where Christ would reign upon the earth “till the time appointed for the last and general resurrection”:

    So pleasing was this hope to the mind of believers [Gibbon writes] that the New Jerusalem, the seat of this blissful kingdom, was quickly adorned with all the gayest colours of the imagination. A felicity consisting only of pure and spiritual pleasure would have appeared too refined for its inhabitants, who were still supposed to possess their human nature and senses. A garden of Eden, with the amusements of the pastoral life, was no longer suited to the advanced state of society which prevailed under the Roman empire. A city was therefore erected of gold and precious stones, and a supernatural plenty of corn and wine was bestowed on the adjacent territory; in the free enjoyment of whose spontaneous production the happy and benevolent people was never to be restrained by any jealous laws of exclusive property.

    (DF, 2:24)

13. Is Gibbon also joking here at the expense of Jesus? Many a Christian reader must remember how Jesus answered the trap-question about the woman who successively married seven men, after the preceding husband died, and died last herself. When asked whose wife she would be in heaven, Jesus replied—diplomatically—that “in the resurrection they neither marry, nor are given in marriage” (Matt. 22:30, King James Version).

14. Jews and Christians, he notes, “were solemnly invited to accept the more perfect [Gibbon's emphasis] revelation of Mahomet; but, if they preferred the payment of a moderate tribute, they were entitled to the freedom of conscience and religious worship” (DF, 5:486). The captive's road to Islamic faith was also simple and easy: “By the repetition of a sentence and the loss of a foreskin, the subject or the slave, the captive or the criminal, arose in a moment the free and equal companion of the victorious Moslems” (DF, 5:486-87).

    Gibbon always displays a transcendent serenity in contemplating the sexual sacrifices of others. After recounting, for example, how Henry II's father, when master of Normandy, castrated all the bishops and the bishop-elect chosen by them because they had acted without his consent, Gibbon comments: “Of the pain and danger they might justly complain; yet, since they had vowed chastity, he deprived them of a superfluous treasure.” The superfluities, by the way, were presented to Henry's father on a platter. See DF, 7:216 n. 16.

15. Gibbon twice speaks of the simplicity of the life of Jesus. In chapter 15 he points out that the “mild constancy [of Jesus of Nazareth] in the midst of cruel and voluntary sufferings, his universal benevolence, and the sublime simplicity of his actions and character” were insufficient, among the pagans, to compensate for “fame, … empire, and … success” (DF, 2:77). In a more important context, however, chapter 47, where Gibbon takes up the theological history of the doctrine of the Incarnation, the asserted simplicity of the life of Jesus marks an important introductory contrast to the record of theologically elaborate and intricate speculation which follows. Gibbon says there:

    The familiar companions of Jesus of Nazareth conversed with their friend and countryman, who, in all the actions of rational and animal life, appeared of the same species with themselves. His progress from infancy to youth and manhood was marked by a regular increase in stature and wisdom; and, after a painful agony of mind and body, he expired on the cross. He lived and died for the service of mankind; but the life and death of Socrates had likewise been devoted to the cause of religion and justice; and, although the stoic or the hero may disdain the humble virtues of Jesus, the tears which he shed over his friend and country may be esteemed the purest evidence of his humanity.

    (DF, 5:97-98)

16. A comparable sceptical thrust is directed at the claim by Christian disciples that an ecclesiastical hero of theirs had exhibited miraculous power: “In the long series of ecclesiastical history,” Gibbon asks in his analysis of the early church's claim of preternatural power, “does there exist a single instance of a saint asserting that he himself possessed the gift of miracles?” See DF, 2:30 n. 82.

17. The remark appears indirectly in Dero Saunders's introduction to The Portable Gibbon: The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, ed. and intro. Dero A. Saunders, pref. Charles Alexander Robinson, Jr. (New York: Penguin, 1977), 15.

18. The reference to Gregory Nazianzen alludes to the third to last paragraph of his first invective against the Emperor Julian. Gregory is denouncing in particular the sexually scandalous and immoral behavior to be gleaned from pagan legend and literature. He calls Hercules “the child of three nights” and expresses his puzzlement that Hercules' “labouring amongst the fifty daughters of Thestias in a single night” is “not counted, I know not wherefore, in the list.” See “Gregory Nazianzen's First Invective Against Julian the Emperor,” in Julian the Emperor: Containing Gregory Nazianzen's Two Invectives and Libanius' Monody with Julian's Extant Theosophical Works, trans. C[harles]. W[illiam]. King (London: George Bell, 1888), 83.

19. Gibbon draws the important distinction between superstition and enthusiasm from David Hume's The Natural History of Religion. Hume also pursues the distinction in his essay “Of Superstition and Enthusiasm.” In “Superstition and Enthusiasm in Gibbon's History of Religion,” J. G. A. Pocock discusses extensively how this distinction works in the Decline and Fall and points out, in particular, that fanaticism can be a quality of either. See Eighteenth-Century Life 8, n.s. 1 (1983):83-94. Julian actually appears as enthusiast and superstitious votary, the latter as he seeks to reinvigorate the pagan priesthood and expand the presence of pagan ritual.

20. Bond, Literary Art of Gibbon, 66.

21. See his The Excellent Empire: The Fall of Rome and the Triumph of the Church (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1987), 57.