If, as Alfred North Whitehead said, the European philosophical tradition is but a series of footnotes to Plato, all of history about Rome is but footnotes to Gibbon.  From the time the first of the six volumes of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire rolled off the press (in 1776) until now, historians writing about the Roman Empire have had to take into account that smug, pudgy, eloquent little man’s version of ancient people and events.

Edward Gibbon (1737-1794) first got the idea for writing about the demise of Rome and her empire on the evening of 15 October, 1764.  Seldom can we date so precisely the origins of a great work of literature.  For along with being a great history, Gibbon’s most famous book is also a classic of English prose.

On that fine evening 250 years ago, Gibbon was in Rome, sitting on the steps of a Catholic church, Santa Maria in Aracoeli.  He heard Franciscan friars chanting Vespers, and he thought about how the magnificent structures of the Caesars were now in ruins while in their place were Christian churches.  Long interested in history, he saw that here was a story worth telling.

Ten years after his life-changing visit to Rome, Gibbon became a member of the House of Commons, and during his nine years there, he kept silent and listened to the debates, especially regarding the problems posed by the British colonies south of Canada.  The course of human events involving the king, the parliament, and the people gave Gibbon another perspective on Roman history.

At the beginning of Chapter 3 of the Decline and Fall, Gibbon observed:  “The obvious definition of a monarchy seems to be that of a state in which a single person, by whatsoever name he may be distinguished, is entrusted with the execution of the laws, the management of the revenue, and the command of the army.”  After all, monarchy means rule by one person.  “But unless,” Gibbon continued, “public liberty is protected by intrepid and vigilant guardians, the authority of so formidable a magistrate will soon degenerate into despotism.”  Thus far, Edmund Burke or John Adams would agree.

Then Gibbon claimed, “The influence of the clergy, in an age of superstition, might be usefully employed to assert the rights of mankind; but so intimate is the connection between the throne and the altar, that the banner of the church has very seldom been seen on the side of the people.”  We will return to this critique.

Gibbon correctly saw only one safeguard against a monarch becoming a despot:  “A martial nobility and stubborn commons, possessed of arms, tenacious of property, and collected into constitutional assemblies, form the only balance capable of preserving a free constitution against enterprises of an aspiring prince.”  A few paragraphs later he noted, “The principles of a free constitution are irrevocably lost, when the legislative power is nominated by the executive.”

Gibbon’s critique of Christians, especially the clergy, recurs throughout his history.  In Chapter 16, he wrote:  “History, which undertakes to record the transactions of the past, for the instruction of future ages, would ill deserve that honourable office if she condescended to plead the cause of tyrants, or to justify the maxims of persecution.”  True enough, and he then declared:  “It must, however, be acknowledged that the conduct of the emperors who appeared the least favourable to the primitive church is by no means so criminal as that of modern sovereigns who have employed the arm of violence and terror against the religious opinions of any part of their subjects.”  One assumes he meant Henry VIII and Elizabeth I.For Gibbon, history was grim entertainment.  In Chapter 3 he defined history as “little more than the register of the crime, follies, and misfortunes of mankind.”  As an Anglican who had converted to Catholicism and then left behind Christianity altogether, Gibbon deemed the most heinous of those crimes, follies, and misfortunes to have occurred at the behest of Christians, especially priests and bishops.

At the end of Chapter 38, Gibbon summed up his subject by saying, “the decline of Rome was the natural and inevitable effect of immoderate greatness.”  The Empire had grown to be too big.  Meanwhile, according to Gibbon, Rome’s martial and manly heritage had been drained and weakened by Christianity, whereby “the active virtues of society were discouraged” and “the sacred indolence of monks was devoutly embraced by a servile and effeminate age.”

A former soldier as well as a politician, Gibbon saw himself also as a philosopher, a lover of wisdom.  In Chapter 38 he suggested modern application of the lessons deriving from Rome’s decline and fall.  “It is the duty of a patriot,” he wrote, “to prefer and promote the exclusive interest and glory of his native country:  but a philosopher may be permitted to enlarge his views, and to consider Europe as one great republic, whose inhabitants have attained almost the same level of politeness and cultivation” as had ancient Rome.

“The savage nations of the globe,” he wrote, “are the common enemies of civilised society,” and for Gibbon savagery and religious fanaticism rode together.  “Should the victorious barbarians” of his day, Gibbon predicted, “carry slavery and desolation as far as the Atlantic Ocean, ten thousand vessels would transport beyond their pursuit the remains of civilised society; and Europe would revive and flourish in the American world, which is already filled with her colonies and institutions.”

Near the end of Chapter 71, the last chapter of his great work, Gibbon surveyed the sorry state of eighteenth-century Rome, edifices such as the Colosseum in ruins because Renaissance Popes had quarried them for their palazzi.  An honest man, Gibbon noted the efforts at historical preservation undertaken “by the most liberal of the pontiffs,” Benedict XIV.  Gibbon added as an aside, “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.”  It is a pity he chose not to do so for the previous seventy chapters.

 

Daniel J. Heisey, O. S. B, is a Benedictine monk of Saint Vincent Archabbey, Latrobe, Pennsylvania, where he is known as Brother Bruno.  He teaches Church History at Saint Vincent Seminary.