Where before I reviewed Gibbon's sources and his take on Decline and Fall, here I continue with the more entertaining aspects: his opinions!
Part II: Theory
Throughout the book, Gibbon shamelessly falls back on his Enlightenment past, focusing in on the exemplars of virtue and British manly vigor. All would be well if Gibbon did not launch off into biographical expose, building up favorite characters into minor deities. A case-in-point is Gibbon’s treatment of Julian the Apostate, ruler of the Empire for a mere year and a half before dying in 363, a somewhat controversial figure for his unorthodox views and actions. Lord Norwich wrote that he was highly intelligent but suffered from fanaticism and “a lack of sharpness and definition in his thinking.” David Potter branded him “Julian the schemer.” But to Gibbon, Julian was the epitome of the virtuous pagan, the perfect philosopher king. Here the reader is presented a man almost devoid of vices, overflowing with virtues, the sort of fellow whom slave girls would have fought over, though the careful abstinence of this pagan saint never allowed them the chance.
Gibbon devotes several chapters to Julian’s brief reign, bringing to life the faultless credulity that led the unscrupulous youth into the embraces of dying paganism, yet leaving him so virtuous as to dim the glories of the effeminate saints. Alarmingly, Gibbon turned to Julian’s own writings to vindicate the man. When the legionaries came to crown their beloved Caesar, Julian’s emotional distress over the prospect of betraying his rightful king inspired a recounting of the divine intervention by Jupiter that sapped Julian’s loyalty, prompting him to take the purple. What this gained from Lord Norwich was a quizzical, “Does Julian, perhaps, protest a little too much?” Forgoing all niceties, David Potter bluntly stated, “Julian saw his chance.” But Gibbon would have none of such unhealthy skepticism. Where he is willing to laud the clever hyperbole employed by Augustus, who amicably claimed to be the first among equals and the servant of Rome, here the author cheerfully glosses over the same prose when penned by Julian and calls it all humility and honest self-depreciation.
The entire life – as much of it as history allowed, that is – of Julian is one great apologetic argument. The rhetoric employed by Gibbon leaves only room for what is good and holy in the breast of Julian, and as though aware that his gushing appraisal might have the unfortunate side effect of irritating the credulity of his readership, the author pauses several times to once more recount for the benefit of the skeptical reader the many virtues and unsullied righteousness of his idol. To contrast this muse among men, Gibbon spares no details in building up a foe in the garrulous and grasping George the Cappadocian. Whether or not the churchman was as bad as Gibbon claims, it is fascinating to watch as George takes on the characteristic shades of pure evil that could have engendered in Procopius the sin of envy. This contrast only serves to magnify the faultless glory of the Apostate. Even the faulty and fated campaign into Persia is spun out like a Greek tragedy, wherein the willing and manly martyr advances, like the swift runner Achilles, on to his glorious end. At last, as the genial and virtuous emperor lies dying of blood loss and a ruptured liver, Gibbon assures us that, after a beatific gulp of water, he “expired without pain.”
But while Gibbon expresses his rapturous fixation upon the champions of stoicism and justice, he also inks copious pages with lamentations against his irritants. Fanaticism and superstition are the great evils of the Decline and Fall. After all, it was fanaticism, overriding his more virtuous notions, that drove Julian to rebel against his master. Likewise, the opponents of Justinian are reviled as superstitious. It may come to no surprise to most that the enemies of Julian – the Christians – are also the frequent bearers of ignorance. That is not to say that Gibbon is an enemy of Christianity; on the contrary, his pages detailing the early church positively glow with reverence. But the later church, with its bishops and its saints and its monks seems to turn Gibbon’s stomach, an understandable conclusion as he recounts, with sinister gravity, the fervor with which the more martially inclined Christians came to dominate Paganism in the years following Julian’s death. He reviles the “piously inhuman” praise of the Old Testament purges that comes from the clergy as the old things are pulled down and all things are made new by “those Barbarians” the Christians. He is alarmed by the rise of saint-worship and the degeneracy of once-pure Christianity. He rails against the ascetics and calls ecclesiastical legends “insipid.” All this in his animated distain for the superstitions of the age. With this in mind, it should come as no surprise that, from the pen of Edward Gibbon should flow the justification of the murder of emperor Valentinian III, not so much for his abject cruelty, but for his adherence to superstitious magics.
Rivaling his ire at the perceived ignorance of his subjects, Gibbon expresses a curious – one might even say “British” – irritation with effeminate trends in the Empire. By his estimation this was a disease that spelt doom for Rome, originating in the government and spreading to the army, thus furthering the decline and fall. The preoccupation with effeminacy and distaste for un-manful luxury seems to start with Constantine the Great’s application of Near Eastern cultural attributes and continues on from there, springing up at the oddest times. Often this takes a humorous bent, such as when the languid culture and moral corruption of the East is several times attributed to the heat index rather than to any relaxation of ethical duty. Herein is the argument that surroundings are what make the man: discomfort is basically good, while even basic comfort and luxury is evil – another theme that permeates the Decline and Fall. In another place, the unwillingness of an Armenian king, Arsaces Tiranus, to commit his forces to a war on Julian’s behalf is attributed to the unmanly decline and pusillanimity – a word of which Gibbon is overly fond – of that monarch. Gibbon goes to great lengths in support of he pet peeve, even pausing in the midst of his expose on Byzantine international trade to point out that Emperor Elagabalus “had sullied the dignity of an emperor and a man” by incorporating silk into his wardrobe. But the degeneracy of manly virtues appears to have been actually quite severe and the fears of Gibbon are justified as he references Vegetius, who noted the growing sloth and effeminate delicacy of the Roman legions.
After his own examination of the foibles of Edward Gibbon, historian Peter Brown sees Gibbon as a “sociologist of empire,” understanding human nature and the nature of power such that, by looking at Rome, the Achaemenid empire, and Tamerlane, he could craft a compelling interpretation of the character of the absolute monarchy of Cyrus. In particular, Gibbon adhered to a strict interpretation of knowledge, abandoning some of the most crucial and conventional evidence because it did not “materially” affect his story. Brown correctly points out that Gibbon chose to include in his work that which belonged in the real world, and some things that did not belong at one point in time might just do so eventually. Such metaphysical questions as filioque would be quite outside the realm of material value until someone died for it. Such was the case with Arianism, a set of beliefs that would have no value to Gibbon whatever, except for the fact that they directly impacted real-world events and inspired Julian to bait his Christian enemies against one another. Such was also the case with Julian’s personal faith. In what Brown would probably term “horrified fascination,” Gibbon took on the task of bringing the young philosopher’s paganism to life:
"A devout and sincere attachment for the gods of Athens and Rome, constituted the ruling passion of Julian; the powers of an enlightened understanding were betrayed and corrupted by the influence of superstitious prejudice; and the phantoms which existed only in the mind of the emperor, had a real and pernicious effect on the government of the empire.”
But pernicious as he saw them, Gibbon later asserted that the nocturnal visitations of the gods, no matter how imaginary, were contrasted with those of the monks; the holy spent their lives in “useless” pursuit of visions, while those of Justinian are lauded in Gibbon’s history as the driving forces that galvanized his actions.
So we see Gibbon as both the historian of detail and the impassioned orator, championing the heroes of old even as their bones molder in distant graves. In this light, our brave Englishman was not a perfect historian. He had his foibles, his prejudices, his own pernicious visions of antique glory that sometimes superseded the evidence. But where one might fault Gibbon’s partiality for Anglo-Roman Enlightenment, the man is somewhat vindicated by his works. The Decline and Fall is an epic prose poem of crumbling grandeur that will long stand outmatched against all comers.
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