Justified True Belief

(●) The greatest historian in the English language, and the man who taught Europe to explain the rise of Christianity without mentioning God. + Most people who have never read a page of Edward Gibbon have met him anyway. More than anyone else, he is why educated Europeans began to speak of the fall of Rome as a long slide rather than a single catastrophe, and he did more than any other writer to plant a suspicion that has never gone away: that the church grew because of very ordinary human appetites, and that a historian who looks closely enough can account for the whole thing without appealing to heaven once. His book is The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, six volumes published between 1776 and 1788, covering thirteen centuries from the peaceful empire of the second century to the ruins of Rome in the fifteenth. Two of its seventy-one chapters, the fifteenth and the sixteenth, are about the early church, and those two chapters set off one of the fiercest religious quarrels in English letters of that century. Bishops answered them. Schoolmasters answered them. Gibbon answered the answers, in print, and went on writing. A Christian has every reason to read him, and it is the same reason a Christian reads David Hume. He is not a hostile caricature of unbelief but its most formidable and most readable representative, and the questions he put to the church in 1776 are still, almost word for word, the questions a thoughtful sceptic puts to it today. He is also, for what it is worth, one of the finest writers of English prose who ever lived, and it should be said that much of his damage was done by sentences rather than by arguments. The most famous of them sits in his second chapter, describing religion under the empire: "The various modes of worship, which prevailed 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." Nothing is asserted. Everything is implied. That is Gibbon.

(●) 1737 AD: Born at Putney so frail that each of his brothers was christened Edward in case he died. + Edward Gibbon was born at Putney, in Surrey, on 27 April 1737, or on 8 May if you prefer the calendar Britain adopted fifteen years later. Historians call the older reckoning Old Style and the newer one New Style, because in 1752 Parliament dropped eleven days to bring the country into line with the rest of Europe. Gibbon dated his own birth the old way in his memoirs and kept his birthday the new way for the rest of his life, which is a small and very Gibbonian joke at the expense of precision. He was the eldest of seven children, and the only one who lived. Five brothers and a sister died in infancy, and he tells the reason for a strange piece of family bookkeeping: he was so sickly that at the baptism of each new son his father repeated the name Edward, so that if the eldest died the family name would still be carried by someone. Imagine a nursery in which five small boys in succession are given the same name because nobody expects the first one to last. His mother Judith died when he was ten, and the raising of him passed to her unmarried sister, Catherine Porten, whom he called "the true mother of my mind as well as of my health." She read with him. She talked with him about whatever he brought her, and she set him loose in books instead of rationing them. School, meanwhile, kept being interrupted by illness; he managed two years at Westminster and spent much of the rest of his childhood in bed with something to read. To her, he wrote, he owed "my early and invincible love of reading, which I would not exchange for the treasures of India."

(●) 1753 AD: At sixteen he read himself into the Church of Rome, and Oxford shut its gates behind him. + In April 1752, not yet fifteen, he was entered at Magdalen College, Oxford. His verdict on the place is one of the most quoted insults in English education: "I spent fourteen months at Magdalen College; they proved the fourteen months the most idle and unprofitable of my whole life." Nobody set him work. Nobody asked what he had read. So he read what he liked, and what he liked was religious controversy. The book that did it was Conyers Middleton’s Free Inquiry into the Miraculous Powers of 1749, which argued that the miracles claimed by the church after the apostles were not credible. Middleton was under attack at Oxford just then, and the attack sent the boy straight to the book, as attacks usually do. What the book then did to him was not at all what its author had intended. Half of Middleton’s case simply failed to land. Gibbon read him and came away still believing that miracles had gone on happening in the early centuries, so the demolition passed him by. The other half landed hard. What Middleton convinced him of was that the doctrines those same early centuries held were every bit as ancient as the miracles: prayers offered for the dead, the veneration of relics, which is the honour paid to the bones and belongings of the saints, and the real presence, the teaching that Christ is genuinely present in the bread and wine of communion rather than merely remembered there. Now put the two halves together the way a bookish boy of sixteen put them together. If the ancient church worked wonders, and the ancient church taught those things, then those things were true. Two works of the French bishop Bossuet finished the job, and in his account he went over entirely on the strength of what he had read: "I never conversed with a priest, or even with a papist, till my resolution from books was absolutely fixed." On 8 June 1753 a priest in London whose name he never learned received him into the Roman church. Then came the consequence he had not calculated. A Roman Catholic could not legally be a member of the university, and it was his own father, in a first burst of anger, who let the news out. "The gates of Magdalen College were for ever shut against my return." He was sixteen, expelled, and in the eyes of the law a considerable embarrassment to a Hampshire gentleman who had sat for two boroughs in the Commons. Looking back at fifty, Gibbon refused to be ashamed of it: "I am proud of an honest sacrifice of interest to conscience."

(●) 1754 AD: Lodged with a Calvinist pastor at Lausanne, he read himself out again, and later gave up the woman he loved. + His father’s remedy was exile. In June 1753 the boy was shipped to Lausanne, in French-speaking Switzerland, and lodged in the house of Daniel Pavillard, a Calvinist minister, on a small allowance, in a country whose language he did not speak. He was there nearly five years, and he always said afterwards that they made him. Pavillard argued with him patiently and, Gibbon allows, skilfully, and deserves "a handsome share of the honour of my conversion." But Gibbon insists the decisive work was again done alone, and he remembers exactly how it felt: a solitary flash of delight at an argument against transubstantiation, the Roman doctrine that the bread and wine of communion actually become the body and blood of Christ while still looking and tasting for all the world like bread and wine. The argument that delighted him is a count of the senses. The words of Scripture that seem to teach the doctrine reach a reader through one sense only, the eye that reads them. The bread on the plate, meanwhile, contradicts the doctrine through three, because it still looks like bread, it still feels like bread, and it still tastes like bread. One witness on that side, three on this. For a boy who had read himself into Rome by exactly this kind of reasoning, that was enough to read him out again. "The various articles of the Romish creed disappeared like a dream." On Christmas Day 1754 he received communion in the church of Lausanne. What happened next mattered more than either conversion. He simply stopped asking. "It was here that I suspended my religious inquiries, acquiescing with implicit belief in the tenets and mysteries, which are adopted by the general consent of catholics and protestants." He would attend church all his life and never again put the question seriously. Meanwhile he learned French until he thought in it, read the Latin classics straight through, and fell in love. Suzanne Curchod was the daughter of a country pastor at Crassier, in the Vaud, clever, poor and much admired. Her parents were willing. His father was not, and refused outright, and an English gentleman’s son of twenty-one with no money of his own had no way at all to disobey. What he wrote about it afterwards is the most human sentence he ever set down: "I sighed as a lover, I obeyed as a son." She went on to marry the Genevan banker Jacques Necker, later finance minister to Louis XVI, and their daughter grew up to be the writer Madame de Staël, one of the great figures of French letters in the next generation. Gibbon stayed a friend of the family for the rest of his life, which tells you something about all three of them.

(●) 1764 AD: Among the ruins of the Capitol he conceived a history of the decline and fall of the city, which grew into the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and took him more than twenty years. + He came home in 1758 and did what the son of a country gentleman did. When France threatened invasion he took a commission, in 1759, in the Hampshire militia, the part-time county force raised for home defence, and from the calling out of the regiment in May 1760 to its disbanding in December 1762 he spent two and a half years drilling farm boys in wet fields. He found it tedious and said so. He also noticed, years later, what it had given him: he had watched a battalion form up and wheel, and so he could picture a legion. "The captain of the Hampshire grenadiers (the reader may smile) has not been useless to the historian of the Roman empire." It is worth remembering that the man who described the Roman army had at least held a pike in the rain. In 1761 he published his first book, an essay on the study of literature, in French, because French was the language of European letters and he wrote it better than he wrote English. Then in 1763 he set off on the Grand Tour, the long continental journey that finished a rich young Englishman’s education, and it took him to Rome. Everything after that depends on a sentence he wrote almost thirty years later: "It was at Rome, on the 15th of October, 1764, as I sat musing amidst the ruins of the Capitol, while the barefooted fryars were singing vespers in the temple of Jupiter, that the idea of writing the decline and fall of the city first started to my mind." Look at what is in that picture. Friars are singing the daily offices of the church inside a building raised to Jupiter, the chief god of the Romans: the new religion sitting in the old one’s house, using the old one’s stones. The whole argument of the six volumes is already there in the image, which is precisely why the scene should be held a little loosely. It is his own recollection, set down long afterwards by a man with a superb eye for an ending, and the journal he kept on the road stops on 2 October, the day he arrived in Rome, a fortnight before the evening he describes. Whether or not the idea really arrived on that precise evening, what followed it was slow rather than sudden. He began with the city only, not the empire, and several years went by before he was seriously at work.

(●) 1776 AD: The first volume sold out in days, and its last two chapters set the clergy of England against him. + His father died in 1770 and left him free, and in 1772 he settled into a house in London with his library about him and began to write in earnest. In 1774 a cousin’s influence put him in Parliament for the Cornish borough of Liskeard, where he sat all through the American war giving, in his own phrase, "many a sincere and silent vote." He never once got up to speak. "Prudence condemned me to acquiesce in the humble station of a mute." The first volume appeared in February 1776, a few weeks before Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations and a few months before the American Declaration of Independence. It went off like a rocket. "The first impression was exhausted in a few days; a second and third edition were scarcely adequate to the demand... My book was on every table, and almost on every toilette." David Hume, the most celebrated philosopher then living in Britain and himself a famous unbeliever, wrote to him in March with praise and with a warning about the last two chapters: "it was impossible to treat the subject so as not to give grounds of suspicion against you, and you may expect that a clamour will arise." Hume was right. Chapters fifteen and sixteen treat the growth of the church as a historical problem with historical causes (T1, T2), and the age of the martyrs as a matter for arithmetic (T3), and the clergy of England understood at once what was being done to them. The replies came fast. Richard Watson, a Cambridge professor who would later become a bishop, published An Apology for Christianity that same year, an apology in the older sense of the word, meaning a reasoned defence rather than an expression of regret. James Chelsum and East Apthorp followed him into print. Gibbon ignored the lot of them, and went on ignoring them, until Henry Edwards Davis of Oxford came at him in 1778 from a different angle altogether. Davis charged him not with unbelief but with misquoting his sources, "not the faith, but the fidelity, of the historian." That he would not have. His Vindication of 1779 answered Davis line by line, with a coldness he was rather proud of, and he refused to let it be printed in the large format of the History "lest it should be bound and preserved with the history itself."

(●) 1787 AD: He finished the History near midnight in a summer house, and felt his freedom turn to melancholy. + The second and third volumes came out in 1781, and by then his life had acquired a cushion. Two years earlier, in 1779, Lord North had found him a government post: a seat on the Board of Trade, one of the salaried boards that advised the ministry on commerce and the colonies, worth some seven hundred and fifty pounds a year. Soon afterwards he repaid the favour in the only currency he had, writing for the ministry a state paper in French that answered a French manifesto. The cushion did not last. Edmund Burke, whose reforming bill was aimed at cutting back the cost of government patronage, abolished the board in 1782, and the salary went with it. So Gibbon sat down and did the arithmetic on his income, and what came out of it was a decision that looks eccentric and was exactly right. He would leave England. He knew when he chose it that his Commons seat for Lymington would go at the next election, and he chose it anyway. In September 1783 he moved to Lausanne, to share a house and a four-acre garden with Georges Deyverdun, the friend he had made there as an exiled boy. There he wrote the last three volumes, and there he finished. The passage describing it is the most famous in his memoirs, and it is worth reading slowly, because a man who had spent twenty years on one book is telling you what the last minute of it felt like: "It was on the day, or rather night, of the 27th of June, 1787, between the hours of eleven and twelve, that I wrote the last lines of the last page, in a summer-house in my garden. After laying down my pen, I took several turns in a berceau, or covered walk of acacias, which commands a prospect of the country, the lake, and the mountains. The air was temperate, the sky was serene, the silver orb of the moon was reflected from the waters, and all nature was silent." Then the joy goes out of it. "But my pride was soon humbled, and a sober melancholy was spread over my mind, by the idea that I had taken an everlasting leave of an old and agreeable companion, and that whatsoever might be the future fate of my History, the life of the historian must be short and precarious." He carried the manuscript to London, and publication of the last three volumes was held back so that the day would fall on 8 May 1788, his fifty-first birthday. His publisher Thomas Cadell gave a dinner for it. Two things he tells us about the writing itself are worth having, because they say what kind of mind this was. The printers worked from his first rough manuscript, with no fair copy made. And not one sheet of it had been read by any eye but his own and the printer’s.

(●) 1794 AD: He died at fifty-six, the day after telling a friend he might be good for another twenty years. + Deyverdun died in 1789, and the French Revolution filled Lausanne with refugees and Gibbon with alarm. Then in April 1793 he heard that Lady Sheffield, the wife of his closest English friend, had died. He was heavy, unwell and past fifty, the roads of Europe were full of armies, and he set out anyway and was in England by the end of May. Of all the things recorded about him, that journey is the one that most resists the caricature of the cold sceptic. He had been ill for a very long time and had told almost nobody. A swelling he first consulted a surgeon about in 1761 had then been left alone for over thirty years, through the militia and Parliament and the whole of the writing, until by late 1793 it could no longer be ignored. The operations that followed did not save him. On 15 January 1794 he told a friend that he thought himself "a good life for ten, twelve, or perhaps twenty years." He was taken ill that night and died the next afternoon, 16 January 1794, at a quarter to one. He was fifty-six. Lord Sheffield buried him in the family vault at Fletching in Sussex. He left his memoirs unfinished, and he left them unfinished six times over. Sheffield went through the papers and found six separate drafts, none of them complete, each one a fresh attempt at the same life, and he stitched them together into the single continuous narrative published in 1796 that everyone has quoted ever since. The drafts as Gibbon actually left them waited another century for a printer.

What He Taught

(T1) The historian’s business is religion as it looked on earth, not as it came down from heaven. + Suppose a man writes the history of a hospital. He can tell you when the wards were built, who paid for them, which matron ran the place well and which one ran it badly, and how many patients came in and went out. What he will not tell you, because his kind of book does not tell you, is whether the medicine actually cured anybody. That is not dishonesty. It is the shape of the enquiry he has chosen. Gibbon opens his fifteenth chapter by choosing exactly that shape, and he chooses it in a sentence so graceful that generations of readers have absorbed the decision without noticing that a decision was being made at all. The theologian, he says, gets the pleasant job of describing religion as she came down from heaven. The historian gets the melancholy one of finding the error and corruption she picked up while living on earth among a weak and degenerate race. Put like that it sounds merely modest, a man declining a task above his pay grade. Read it a second time, though, and the wording gives itself away. The description from heaven has not been postponed; it has been handed to somebody else, filed under a different profession, and it is not coming back into the book. This is what later writers would call methodological naturalism, which means simply this: while doing a particular kind of work, you agree to explain things only by causes inside the natural world. A geologist dating a rock does it. A doctor diagnosing a fever does it, and so does the Christian doctor in the next consulting room, who prays for the patient afterwards and does not write "judgment" on the chart. There is nothing sinister in the rule itself, and believers use it every day of their working lives. The difficulty arrives at the point where a restriction adopted for the sake of method starts to sound like a discovery about the way things actually are. Gibbon was far too careful a writer to state that stronger claim outright. He simply wrote in a manner that let the reader arrive at it unassisted, and feel clever for having done so.

(Q) "The theologian may indulge the pleasing task of describing Religion as she descended from Heaven, arrayed in her native purity. A more melancholy duty is imposed on the historian. He must discover the inevitable mixture of error and corruption, which she contracted in a long residence upon earth, among a weak and degenerate race of beings." + Source: Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, chapter XV (1776). From the opening pages of the chapter on the progress of Christianity, where he sets out the difficulties of the enquiry, and the hinge on which the whole two-chapter argument turns. Henry Hart Milman, the clergyman who edited the History in 1838, answered this very passage in a footnote to his own edition, asking his readers to divest it of its latent sarcasm.

(T2) Christianity spread through five human causes, and the first of them was an intolerant zeal. + Here is the question Gibbon set, and it is a perfectly fair one. A small movement inside a despised Jewish sect, with no army, no money and no social standing, ended up as the official religion of the Roman Empire in under three hundred years. How? He begins by granting the Christian answer, and he grants it in a single courteous sentence: it was owing "to the convincing evidence of the doctrine itself, and to the ruling providence of its great Author." Providence means God’s governing of history, his hand on events as they happen. Having granted that much, Gibbon observes that providence generally works through ordinary human passions and circumstances anyway, and so proposes to ask a narrower question. Not what the first cause was, but what the secondary causes were, meaning the ordinary machinery through which the thing actually came about. Then he lists five of them, and he never mentions the first cause again. - Zeal. Christians would not hedge, and in that world hedging was what everybody did. A Roman could take up a new god without giving up any of the old ones, the way a man adds a name to a guest list, and every people in the empire managed it except this one. The refusal made the Christians intolerable to their neighbours, and it also made them unbudgeable. Gibbon thought they had inherited the habit from Judaism and had then dropped the barrier of nation and descent that had kept Judaism itself from spreading. - The doctrine of a future life. The old religion asked a man for a ceremony and promised him very little afterwards. A faith that tells him he will rise from the dead and stand at a judgment has a different kind of grip altogether, and it keeps its grip on the days when believing has become expensive. - The miraculous powers ascribed to the primitive church. The wording here is doing quiet work, and it repays a second look. Gibbon does not say the church had miraculous powers. He says such powers were ascribed to it, which leaves the question of whether any of them happened standing politely outside the room, where it will not interrupt. - The pure and austere morals of the Christians. This one he grants without a sneer, and he was right to. By the standards of the age the Christians really were remarkably good, and their neighbours, who lived close enough in a crowded city to know exactly how anyone behaved, could see it plainly. - The union and discipline of the Christian republic. Bishops and deacons, a common fund that fed widows and the poor, letters carried from one city to another and read out to the congregation: the church was an organization living inside the empire, and no cult of Isis or Mithras ever built anything remotely like it. Gibbon’s own summary calls this a band of "well-trained and intrepid volunteers" against "an undisciplined multitude." Now read the five causes as a Christian, and something odd happens to them. Four of the five are things the gospel claims to produce. Zeal, the hope of resurrection, holiness of life and brotherly union are what people look like once they have come to believe that a particular thing is true, which means that naming them as the causes of the believing explains rather less than it appears to. Richard Watson made exactly that criticism in 1776, within months of the book appearing, and nobody has made it better since.

(Q) "It was by the aid of these causes, exclusive zeal, the immediate expectation of another world, the claim of miracles, the practice of rigid virtue, and the constitution of the primitive church, that Christianity spread itself with so much success in the Roman empire." + Source: Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, chapter XV (1776). His own recapitulation of the five causes (T2), set down where he turns from the causes to their effect, about two thirds of the way through the chapter. The five are stated formally earlier, the first of them as "The inflexible, and, if we may use the expression, the intolerant zeal of the Christians."

(T3) The martyrs were real, and there were far fewer of them than the church remembered. + By the eighteenth century the age of persecution had grown enormous in the Christian imagination. Medieval collections of saints’ lives spoke of whole legions martyred at once, of wounds healing on the spot, of severed limbs restored. Gibbon’s sixteenth chapter takes those stories out of the stained glass and puts them on a table with a pencil beside them. What he produces is an estimate rather than a count, and the reason it is so hard to wave away is that he shows his working. Follow it slowly, because every step of it can be checked. He starts with Eusebius of Caesarea, the fourth-century church historian who lived through the last persecution himself and is the chief witness to it. Eusebius records that nine bishops were put to death. In a separate short book on the martyrs of Palestine, which was his own province, he counts ninety-two. Palestine, Gibbon reckons, was about a sixteenth of the eastern half of the empire, so multiply the ninety-two out by sixteen and then allow something for the governors who never prosecuted anybody at all. What the eastern provinces yield on that reckoning is "about fifteen hundred" over the ten years the persecution ran. Spread across a territory that stretched from the Danube to Egypt, that is roughly a hundred and fifty deaths a year. The west is easier, because in Italy, Africa and Spain the edicts lapsed after two or three years; add a proportionate figure for those, and the total for the whole empire during the last and worst persecution it ever mounted comes to "somewhat less than two thousand persons" put to death by judicial sentence. Then he turns to the closing passage of the chapter, and the sentence that did the most damage there is not an argument about numbers at all. It is a comparison. Whatever the tally of Christians killed by Rome, he says, Christians killed a great many more of each other afterwards. The line is placed exactly where a reader will remember it, and what he brings up behind it is the Inquisition, along with the figure given by Hugo Grotius, the Dutch jurist and Protestant scholar of the previous century, of more than a hundred thousand executed in the Netherlands under Charles V. That is a century past the end of Gibbon’s own narrative, which is worth keeping in mind. Two things should be said about all this by anyone who cares about the truth, and the first will be uncomfortable. Gibbon was broadly right about the numbers, and the church has quietly come round to agreeing with him. The enormous medieval figures do not survive contact with the sources, and a Christian has no business defending them. But the second thing matters more, because the corrected figure is not the deflation it looks like. What has to be explained is not the size of the pile. It is the existence of it. Two thousand people, in a single decade, in a world that was offering them their lives back for a pinch of incense on a brazier, chose otherwise. That is what still needs a cause.

(Q) "We shall conclude this chapter by a melancholy truth, which obtrudes itself on the reluctant mind; that even admitting, without hesitation or inquiry, all that history has recorded, or devotion has feigned, on the subject of martyrdoms, it must still be acknowledged, that the Christians, in the course of their intestine dissensions, have inflicted far greater severities on each other, than they had experienced from the zeal of infidels." + Source: Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, chapter XVI (1776). The sentence that opens the closing passage of the chapter on the persecutions, a little after his computation of fewer than two thousand executions (T3). "Intestine" means internal: the quarrels of Christians with one another. "Infidels" here means the pagan authorities, not Muslims.

(T4) Rome fell to barbarism and religion, and the second did some of the work of the first. + This is the charge everyone remembers, and almost everyone remembers it in a cruder form than Gibbon ever put it. He was careful here. The care is the interesting part. In his general reflections on the fall of the western empire he writes that "the introduction, or at least the abuse of Christianity, had some influence on the decline and fall of the Roman empire." The second clause is an escape hatch and he leaves it standing open on purpose: not the faith necessarily, but at any rate the abuse of it. The indictment itself then follows in one long sentence. The clergy preached patience and meekness. The active civic virtues went out of fashion. The last of the military spirit was buried in monasteries, money that would have paid soldiers went instead to charity and to monks, and the attention of emperors was pulled away from the frontiers towards the councils where bishops argued about doctrine. A thousand years of Roman civic energy, on this account, was quietly redirected from the walls to the cloister. The next few lines are almost never quoted, and they change the picture. Party spirit, Gibbon says, unites as well as divides. The bishops preached obedience to lawful rulers from eighteen hundred pulpits. The constant traffic of letters between distant churches held the communion together, and "the benevolent temper of the gospel" was genuinely strengthened by all this, even if it was largely confined to fellow believers. He even grants that the monastery gave a decent refuge to men who would otherwise have deserted the army for considerably baser reasons. Then, at the very end of the whole work, thirteen centuries after he began, he sums himself up in a single phrase: he has described "the triumph of barbarism and religion." The verdict is real, and no Christian should pretend otherwise. It is also a good deal more measured than its reputation, and a Christian answering Gibbon ought to answer the sentence he actually wrote rather than the one he is remembered for.

(Q) "The clergy successfully preached the doctrines of patience and pusillanimity; the active virtues of society were discouraged; and the last remains of the military spirit were buried in the cloister." + Source: Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, "General Observations on the Fall of the Roman Empire in the West," which follows chapter XXXVIII and closes the third volume (1781). "Pusillanimity" means smallness of spirit, faint-heartedness. The sentence sits inside a longer passage that both states the charge and immediately qualifies it (T4), and it was written about the Christianized empire of the fourth and fifth centuries, not about the church of the apostles.

(T5) A miracle that leaves no mark on the records of a literate age is a miracle worth doubting. + Suppose a man tells you that the sun went out over his town one afternoon for three solid hours. The first thing you would do, before arguing with him about anything, is ask whether anybody else in the town happened to notice. That is the whole of Gibbon’s closing move, and it is the single sharpest thing in the two chapters. He ends his fifteenth chapter not with a flourish but with a piece of evidence. The third of his five causes was "the miraculous powers ascribed to the primitive church," and he had been reading the early Christian writers claim that the laws of nature were suspended fairly regularly for the church’s benefit. His question is the obvious one. If they were, why did nobody else notice? The philosophers and historians of Greece and Rome, he observes, went on with their work and appeared quite unconscious that anything whatever had altered in the government of the world. Then he presses on the hardest case he can find, which is the darkness at the crucifixion. The Gospels report that while Jesus hung on the cross the land went dark for three hours, and Gibbon restates the claim in his own carefully widened terms: under Tiberius the whole earth, or at any rate one well-known province of the empire, lay in a darkness of three hours. So who was at hand to see it? Seneca, the philosopher and imperial tutor, lived at the time, and so did the elder Pliny, who spent a working life assembling a natural history of everything he could collect. Both men catalogued earthquakes, comets, meteors and eclipses with a tireless appetite for exactly this sort of thing. Neither of them mentions it. Gibbon lets the observation stand with a raised eyebrow and moves on. This is Gibbon at his most effective, and it repays study rather than indignation, because it is a genuine argument and it has genuine Christian answers. Some of those answers are strong. Seneca’s surviving work is fragmentary, Pliny’s collection is nowhere near exhaustive, a darkness over Judea would have registered in Rome, if at all, as somebody else’s weather, and the Gospel accounts themselves describe a local rather than a global event. Some of the answers are weaker, and a Christian should be willing to say which are which. What makes the whole thing worth the trouble is that Gibbon’s method here is testable, which most insinuation is not, and meeting it honestly is a great deal more use than resenting it.

(Q) "Under the reign of Tiberius, the whole earth, or at least a celebrated province of the Roman empire, was involved in a preternatural darkness of three hours. Even this miraculous event, which ought to have excited the wonder, the curiosity, and the devotion of mankind, passed without notice in an age of science and history." + Source: Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, chapter XV (1776). "Preternatural" means outside the ordinary course of nature. The passage comes in the last paragraphs of the chapter, and it is followed immediately by his observation that Seneca and the elder Pliny, who recorded every strange phenomenon they could gather, both omit it (T5).

(Q) "The present is a fleeting moment, the past is no more; and our prospect of futurity is dark and doubtful. This day may possibly be my last: but the laws of probability, so true in general, so fallacious in particular, still allow about fifteen years." + Source: Gibbon, Memoirs of My Life and Writings (written about 1791, published 1796). He was in his mid-fifties and in good spirits, totting up his remaining years from the life tables the way he had totted up the martyrs. He was allowed fewer than three of them. The man who had explained a religion of resurrection by five secondary causes had, when he came to the end of his own account of himself, nothing at all to say about what came afterwards except that it was dark and doubtful.

What Christian Thinkers Made of Him

(†) The answers came within months, from bishops and schoolmasters, and Gibbon answered back in print. + There is a picture of the eighteenth century in which the sceptics write and the church sulks. It is not what happened here. Within a year of the first volume the replies were in the bookshops, and they came from every level of the English church. The first and best of them was Richard Watson, then Regius Professor of Divinity at Cambridge, the senior chair of theology in the university, and later Bishop of Llandaff. He published An Apology for Christianity in 1776 as a series of courteous letters addressed to Gibbon himself, and the courtesy was not a tactic. He conceded the historian’s learning freely, declined to call him a bad man, and then went straight at the argument rather than the author: you derive Christian zeal from the Jewish religion, he wrote, and "I would refer it to a more adequate and a more obvious source, a full persuasion of the truth of Christianity." Gibbon respected him for it and said so in print, ending his reply to Watson in the Vindication with "Such is the man whom I should be happy to call my friend," and describing him in his memoirs as "a prelate of a large mind and liberal spirit." The others fared variously. James Chelsum and East Apthorp wrote at greater length and to considerably less effect. In 1778 Henry Edwards Davis of Oxford published an examination of the two chapters charging Gibbon with misusing his authorities, which is the charge that stung, and Gibbon’s Vindication of 1779 replied point by point and, on the specifics, largely won. Joseph Milner, a schoolmaster at Hull, answered differently again, and in the end most durably. He published Gibbon’s Account of Christianity Considered in 1781, and then, instead of arguing further, set about telling the story from the inside. His History of the Church of Christ began to appear in 1794, the year Gibbon died, and it outlasted every direct rebuttal on the shelf. As for Gibbon, after the Vindication he answered nobody at all, meeting the later attacks, as he put it himself, with an impenetrable silence. The quarrel left a permanent mark on how Gibbon is printed. The great nineteenth-century editions, Milman’s of 1838 and J. B. Bury’s of 1896 to 1900, both admire him enormously and both annotate chapters fifteen and sixteen closely, correcting where the notes will not carry the weight of the text. Milman, a clergyman himself, quarrels with his author openly in those notes rather than let the sentences stand alone. A reader today who wants Gibbon with the corrections attached can simply read one of those.

(†) His question outlived his answers, and Christian historians now work the ground he broke. + Two and a half centuries on, almost nobody defends Gibbon’s five causes as he framed them. Almost everybody accepts his question. How did this movement grow, at what rate, through which social mechanisms, among which classes, in which cities? That is now simply what the study of early Christianity looks like from the inside, and Gibbon is the reason it looks that way. The most striking example is a book written by a sociologist who thought Gibbon had asked exactly the right question and then reached for the wrong tools to answer it. Rodney Stark’s The Rise of Christianity (1996) begins by working out what growth rate is actually needed to get from a few thousand believers to several million in three centuries. The answer turns out to be about forty per cent a decade, which is roughly the rate at which the Mormon church has grown in modern times: steep, sustained, and entirely ordinary in shape. There is no need for an explosion. Stark then argues that the causes were social and observable, and names them: the church’s care of its own sick, and of other people’s, when the plagues came through; its flat refusal to leave unwanted infants out to die, which was a normal and legal thing to do in that world; and the standing it gave to women. None of that is an argument against providence. It is a description of how conversion actually travels from one house to the next, which is precisely what Gibbon asked for, and Christians have generally found that it strengthens the case rather than threatening it, because the mechanisms keep turning out to be the visible works of the doctrine. The same holds for the martyrs. Modern historians of persecution have largely confirmed Gibbon’s arithmetic, and have gone further than he did in sorting the genuine early accounts from the later legend. The sober figure is more useful to a Christian than the inflated one ever was (T3). A smaller number of people who chose death when a pinch of incense would have bought their lives back is still a fact that wants explaining, and it is in fact harder to explain away as mass hysteria than the legendary armies of martyrs ever were. A crowd can be swept along. People brought up one at a time before a magistrate, and asked one at a time, cannot.

(†) Where the gospel parts company with him: the event his history begins after. + Gibbon should be met on his own record, and on his own record there are three places where the gospel simply does not go with him. - The event he steps around. His narrative opens in the age of the Antonines, the settled and prosperous empire of the second century, roughly a hundred years after the claim the church existed in order to make. The whole question of whether Jesus of Nazareth rose from the dead therefore lies behind him before his first page begins, and what he inherits is a church already there, a phenomenon to be explained rather than a testimony to be weighed. Paul, who founded the very congregations Gibbon is describing, rested every part of the thing on that one event: "And if Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain" (1 Corinthians 15:14). And he offered it as public history, open to checking by anyone who cared to, naming witnesses who were still alive to be asked (1 Corinthians 15:6) and telling King Agrippa, with the Roman governor sitting beside him, that the thing "has not been done in a corner" (Acts 26:26). A history of Christianity that never reaches the resurrection has not refuted it. It has declined the fixture. - Causes that borrow what they need to explain. Zeal, the hope of a future life, austere morals and disciplined union are four of his five causes, and all four of them are what conviction produces in people rather than what produces the conviction. Watson said it first and said it best in 1776: the zeal comes from "a full persuasion of the truth of Christianity." Gibbon explains the fruit by the fruit. - A rule of method offered as a finding. He grants the Christian answer, providence and the evidence of the doctrine, in a single handsome sentence, and then rules it out of the enquiry by profession rather than by argument (T1). A historian is perfectly entitled to restrict himself to secondary causes; that is his trade. What he is not entitled to do is let the restriction read as a conclusion, and Gibbon’s prose, which never once states the stronger claim, is built from end to end so that the reader will supply it for him. None of that makes him a bad historian, and Christians who treat him as a mere enemy lose the use of him, which is a poor bargain. He forced the church to count its martyrs honestly, to tell the records of the first three centuries apart from the embroidery of the next ten, and to make its case in the open court of evidence rather than from the safety of the sanctuary. That is work the church badly needed done, and it was an unbeliever who did it. The parting comes at the point where the counting stops and the question begins. Gibbon wrote thirteen centuries of the consequences, in six volumes, over twenty years, and never once turned round to look at the cause.