A Standard for Literary Bravery

Friday, January 22nd, 2010

Gibbon’s Decline and Fall sets a standard for literary bravery, Robert Kaplan says:

He sought no one’s approval and was afraid of nothing. In his day the Church was a sacred cow; he was merciless in his exposition of its evolution. According to Gibbon, Christianity — to use the words of the historian Hugh Trevor-Roper in his introduction to the Decline and Fall — emerged from a “heretical Jewish sect” to become a “novel cult of virginity” and the most “persistent of the competing new Oriental superstitions,” eventually to capture power as a “revolutionary ideology.” Concerning the persecutions of the Christians, Gibbon concluded, after exhaustive documentation,
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.

Not surprisingly, the publication of the Decline and Fall met with bitter controversy. Though the book was praised by the philosopher David Hume and others, attacks on Gibbon for his treatment of the Church were widespread and sustained: almost sixty denunciatory books about him were published in his lifetime.

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