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‘SCEPTICISM IN EXCESS’: GIBBON AND EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY CHRISTIANITY

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 March 1998

B. W. YOUNG
B. W. YOUNG
Affiliation:
University of Sussex
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Abstract

Since the appearance of volume I of The decline and fall of the Roman empire in 1776, the religion of Edward Gibbon has been subject to intense debate. He has been variously identified as an atheist, a deist, even as a somewhat detached Christian. Examination of his relations, both personal and scholarly, with the varieties of religion and irreligion current in eighteenth-century Britain leads to the conclusion that he remained resolutely critical of all such positions. He did not share the convictions of dogmatic freethinkers, still less those of determined atheists. The product of a nonjuring family, Gibbon benefited from the scholarly legacy of several high church writers, while maintaining a critical attitude towards the claims of Anglican orthodoxy. It was through the deliberate and ironical adoption of the idiom of via media Anglicanism, represented by such theologians as the clerical historian John Jortin, that Gibbon developed a woundingly sceptical appraisal of the history of the early church. This stance made it as difficult for his contemporaries to identify Gibbon's religion as it has since proved to be for modern historians. Gibbon appreciated the central role of religion in shaping history, but he remained decidedly sceptical as to Christianity's ultimate status as revealed and unassailable truth.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Historical Journal , Volume 41 , Issue 1 , March 1998 , pp. 179 - 199
Copyright
© 1998 Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

This essay was originally read at the ‘Restoration to Reform Seminar’ at All Souls College, Oxford, in January 1996. I am particularly grateful to John Burrow, Marilyn Butler, Isabel Rivers, John Robertson, William St Clair, Michael Suarez, John Walsh, and David Womersley, all of whom asked thoughtful questions of me on that occasion. Mishtooni Bose, Lord Dacre, Peter Ghosh, Colin Kidd, David Womersley, and Blair Worden have also kindly read and commented on it.