Edward Gibbon · Civilisations
Gibbon’s scandalous achievement - treating the rise of Christianity not as divine truth but as a historical phenomenon with natural causes, founding the secular study of religion.
In the fifteenth and sixteenth chapters of the Decline and Fall, Gibbon did something that scandalised his deeply Christian age: he treated the rise of Christianity not as the miraculous descent of divine truth, but as a historical phenomenon to be explained by ordinary human and natural causes - the same way a historian would explain the rise of any other movement or institution. He examined how and why Christianity spread, what human and historical factors account for its success, with the cool, skeptical, analytical eye of the Enlightenment historian rather than the reverent eye of the believer. This treatment of the sacred history of Christianity as ordinary, explicable, human history caused an enormous scandal and made Gibbon notorious.
Gibbon framed his approach with characteristic irony. The theologian, he says, may enjoy describing religion in her ‘native purity’ as she descended from Heaven; but a ‘melancholy duty’ is imposed on the historian, who must trace religion as she actually existed on earth - discovering the ‘inevitable mixture of error and corruption’ she contracted in her long residence among ‘a weak and degenerate race of beings.’ In other words, the historian must study religion not as divine and pure but as it actually was in human history - mixed with human error, corruption, ambition, and folly, shaped by human motives and historical circumstances, subject to all the failings of the human beings who carried it. This treatment of religion as a human, historical phenomenon, mixed with human error and corruption, rather than as pure divine truth, was at the heart of Gibbon’s revolutionary and scandalous approach.
What most scandalised and most influenced was Gibbon’s stance - his cool, detached, skeptical, analytical view of religion from outside, as a phenomenon to be observed and explained, rather than from inside, as a truth to be believed and revered. He famously remarked that the various modes of worship in the Roman world were ‘all considered by the people as equally true; by the philosopher as equally false; and by the magistrate as equally useful.’ This ironic, detached, skeptical view - observing religions from outside as human phenomena, neither believing nor revering them but analysing their truth, falsity, and usefulness with the cool eye of the skeptical philosopher - was the essence of Gibbon’s Enlightenment approach to religion, and the source of both its scandal and its influence. It treated religion not as sacred truth but as a human phenomenon to be coolly observed, analysed, and explained - the detached, skeptical, secular stance that would become foundational to the modern study of religion.
This is the opening of the lesson. The rest — the dialogue, the primary source, and the recall — is in the app.
You learned that Gibbon treated Christianity as a historical phenomenon with natural causes, scandalising his age. Explain his approach and why it was both shocking and important, in your own words.
Leads to David Hume.
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