Welcome to Madison’s Footnotes, the substack page for the Madison’s Notes podcast of Princeton University’s James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions.
250 years ago when the United States declared independence, across the ocean Edward Gibbon published the first volume of his magisterial series, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Immediately, his text caused a storm of controversy. Many readers thought that Gibbon had implied that the rise of Christianity caused the fall of the western empire. But is that the real story?
To answer that question, in Episode 1 of Season 6, I have as our guest Hugh Liebert. A Professor of Political Science at West Point (as well as a returning guest from Season 3), he earned his doctorate through the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago, and has written two books: Plutarch’s Politics (2016), and Gibbon’s Christianity (2022).
Drawing on Gibbon’s Christianity, we discuss the historian’s paradoxical views on religion, and how he used his experiences—from youthful conversions to Catholicism, Protestantism, and then skepticism, his friendships with Enlightenment figures like Voltaire and Hume, to his service in the militia and Parliament—to chronicle empires and religions as an ironic, but often sympathetic, outsider.
This historian applied ancient cyclical ideas about social rise and collapse to religion, fused economic insights from Adam Smith with ancient textual sources, and depicted Christianity as a disciplined republic that overcame Rome’s decadent polytheism. Along the way, we discuss Gibbon’s essays and memoirs, his concept of philosophical history, his sardonic humor, and the love of literary glory that pervades his fascinating life and immortal work.
This transcript has been edited for clarity and length. Please enjoy.
Professor Liebert, welcome to Madison’s Notes.
Thank you, Ryan. I’m looking forward to our conversation.
Please tell me a bit about yourself. You studied at University of Chicago. Is that where you got your interest in Edward Gibbon? How did that work out?
Yes, in a certain sense. (I should say up front that I’m here in a personal capacity, and not speaking on behalf of West Point or the Department of War.)
I went to grad school at the University of Chicago. The first time I really encountered Gibbon was through a professor who was reaching the end of his career and had a bucket list of great books that he intended to read and talk about with students before he was done. On that list was Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. So that’s when I really first encountered it as a book that I ought to read.
It’s not a book I really read, though, until a little bit later on when I had finished this book on Plutarch, and was looking for an author who would help me connect the time when Plutarch lived under what Gibbon called the “Age of the Antonines,” the second century of our era, to modernity. Here was one author in the canon who promised to do that, and that was Edward Gibbon.
So I read the Decline and Fall at that time, really just to have a single historical narrative that could help me get from Plutarch to modernity.
Was this because of your taste in literature? Was it an exercise in political theory? Were you wanting to do actual history, or a combination of all three?
It was really all three, but I’ll tell you, the taste part of it is a very good thing to highlight. Gibbon is an extraordinarily beautiful writer. Plutarch’s pretty good too, but as far as writers in English, it’s hard not to be bewitched by Gibbon’s prose when you start to read it. So I once you read a book or two you can’t really put it down, and that was definitely my experience picking it up.
What were the things that stood out to you about him in your reading? I’m guessing you went through all six volumes.
Yeah, all the copious notes. So Gibbon wrote a great work in many senses of the word great. It’s great in magnitude, for one. So it’s a six-volume history of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire that picks up in the second century and ends with the fall of Constantinople in 1453, but actually extends a little past that. There are some scenes from the 16th century.
So that’s a lot of ground to cover. Gibbon covers it in a work that in the best edition—published and edited by David Womersley—is about 3,000 pages, over a million words, six separate volumes that were published in three tranches. So that’s useful to have at the beginning.
Volume one came out in 1776, 250 years ago. Volumes two and three came out in 1781, and then the final half of it (the volumes four through six) came out in 1788. So yeah, I read my way through it, mainly out of wanting to have some sense of really the history of it. So it was more for information than anything else, but I started to read it differently after getting all the way through.
Gibbon has a reputation as “an infidel historian,” as someone who’s highly skeptical of religion in general, particularly Christianity. So I read him through. I had more or less that encounter with the text. It more or less fit the prejudices that I had about it going in on that specific issue of religion.
But then I wanted to get to know Gibbon a little bit better, having only spent 3,000 pages with him, and so I started to read his Memoirs. Now, he wrote six drafts of his memoirs towards the end of his life. He never finished it, and never published it as a single work during his lifetime. But there’s a scene in those memoirs that just moved me so deeply when I read it and opened up an entirely new perspective on the work as a whole.
Is this the famous line, perhaps his most famous line, which is not from The Decline and Fall, but about how he wrote The Decline and Fall?
Yes. It’s that line. It’s probably the most famous sentence he wrote, and he wrote several famous sentences. But the setting is October 15th, 1764. He’s in Rome at the end of a grand tour that he’s taken. And this is what he writes in one of the drafts of his memoirs.
He says: “It was at Rome on the 15th of October 1764, as I sat musing amidst the ruins of the Capitol while the barefooted friars 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.” Now that’s a beautiful sentence. So what struck me about that sentence?
What is The Decline and Fall about? That way of framing its origin and its genesis highlights this issue of religious transformation. There are friars, barefooted friars singing vespers. Where? In the temple of Jupiter. So what happened? How did paganism come to be replaced by Christianity? That scene that encapsulates that religious transformation is the thing that moved Gibbon to write.
Now, that might not be terribly shocking to anyone who’s read The Decline and Fall, but what I noticed about this is that when Gibbon’s telling that story of what interested him, he tells it as a conversion story. He was not the historian of Rome before this moment on October 15th, 1764. Then he had this vision, and after that he was going to be the person who eventually wrote this great work, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.
So here is an author, I realized, who—for whatever skepticism he might have towards religion, and towards Christianity—was not the sneering, philosophe-inspired critic of it in such a way that he couldn’t appropriate one of the central phenomena that Christianity calls attention to this conversion thing, and make it his own.
So he told a conversion story about how he became the historian of the Roman Empire. He wasn’t sneering like his friend and semi-mentor, Voltaire. But he was very sardonic. His sarcasm, among many things, is one of his greatest literary virtues. But he always wasn’t always so sarcastic about religion. In fact, in his youth, he had several different actual religious conversions. Can you tell me a bit about those and how they led to his insights as an author?
Yeah, it’s absolutely true he’s sardonic, first of all. His reputation as an infidel historian isn’t totally unmerited. But there’s a deeper level, too, and I think the way you can access some of his more sympathetic ways he opens up religious phenomena to his readers come to light when you attend to his autobiography.
He has a fascinating background with respect to religion. He grows up in a more or less conventional Anglican household, but at the age of 14 is sent to Oxford University. He does not like it at Oxford University. He’s highly critical of the institution, and at the age of 16 converts to Catholicism.
Now, this is a very big deal. In the England of Gibbon’s youth, being a Catholic bars you from attending Oxford, and bars you from most positions of civic office. It’s a big deal. His father reacts very harshly towards this, informs the university, and sends Gibbon packing to Lausanne, Switzerland, on a study abroad trip to be returned to the Protestant faith and to Anglicanism, which works actually.
So 18 months after Gibbon is shipped off to Switzerland to study under this Calvinist pastor, Daniel Pavillard, he returns to Protestantism Christmas Day 1754, and from that point on is some measure of Protestant. And then, he seems increasingly skeptical and has a kind of distance from religion, but not so distant that he can’t have something like a conversion experience in 1764 and describe it as a conversion experience.
Now, that history (to me) is of curiosity. It’s interesting to know an author and his experiences. But I think it really helps to highlight Gibbon’s own personal experience of the phenomena that he’s writing about on the historical canvas in The Decline and Fall. He’s someone who understands the process of religious conversion from a very personal level, and not just as a historical object.
Do you think that when Gibbon went to Switzerland to be de-radicalized from Roman Catholicism, those readings and tutoring historicized religion for him? He started to look at medieval Christianity as a historical phenomenon, and thus started seeing religion generally in that lens, and being distant from his own personal conversion gave him a sometimes almost Freudian way of looking at and analyzing it?
Yeah, I think that’s part of it for sure, that he saw it as a historical phenomenon, and that gave him a bit of distance from it.
But I think that more than anything else, he just realized and really started to experience in a lived way what it was like to study something and to really care about discovering truths for oneself. This is what the experience was of reading a book and of really engaging with something, because he had this wonderful tutor, Daniel Pavillard, who approached him differently than any teacher he had up to that point in his life approached him.
There were certain parameters— like he had to get up early in the morning, for instance, and this was a good habit that he kept for the rest of his life to get up very early and work for a few hours. There were certain loose guidelines about what he should be reading. But by and large, Pavillard left him free to explore with just a little bit of left and right limits.
He became a scholar in that period, and I think his love of learning was just so inflamed at that moment, that passion, in a way, for learning drowned out every other passion in his life, and religion was one of many things he wanted to understand. In his love of learning, he pursued classical studies, and he pursued an interest in Rome, but at first, it was inchoate.
You mention in your book an essay he wrote in French. Can you please tell me about it?
Yeah, “An Essay on the Study of Literature.” His first big publication, this is a defense of erudition. So if there are any classicists in the audience, this is a wonderful polemic. It might be useful to address some critics of the humanities these days.
But Gibbon basically lays out an argument against some of the philosophes, saying that classical erudition is a worthwhile thing to pursue. And he defends all the different qualities of character that go along with trying to parse a Latin or Greek text, the kinds of the qualities of mind imbued by really investigating something historically and trying to get to the truth of it.
He defends erudition, but in the course of doing this develops a theory of history that’s going to run pretty much from this essay, which comes out in 1761, all the way through The Decline and Fall, including the last volumes in 1788.
The basic theory of history is a cyclical theory of history. It’s one that he learns from the ancients and makes his own. The story is that the general shape of most historical development has to do with poor, hungry, tough people conquering big, soft, wealthy people, taking over, and in the process becoming wealthy, soft, corrupt, until they are conquered by poor, hungry people.
It’s this cyclical theory in which you get wealthy and successful and slowly lose out to people who are still hungry and coming up. He thinks that theory of history explains a lot of the patterns he sees from antiquity up to the present, when he’s writing in 1761. As he works on this essay, he comes to see that it actually might be the key to understanding not only history, but things like the disciplines, which ones are in power, and thus it’s a very broadly applicable theory, in other words.
So he makes a case for erudition—that’s one very important thing he does in that essay—and then develops his idea of what he calls “philosophical history” that’s attuned to those permanent patterns in human affairs, which he starts to recognize and then will use later on.
Do you think that Gibbon is being esoteric with his skepticism in regard to Christianity? Not to say that he is a Christian, but that he’s hiding the subtlety of his view.
It seems the usual view is: “Oh, Gibbon’s truly the infidel historian. He’s always just suggestive about it. He never comes out and says it.” He seems to imply several times, even including in his Memoir, that the introduction of Christianity had something to do with the weakening of the strength of the Roman Empire.
Is that excavation saying that it’s not only that relationship, or is that apparent view actually not the true view of what Gibbon’s account is?
Yeah, Gibbon’s a very interesting esoteric writer. So much so that I’m reluctant to use that term to talk to him. In a few different ways. He’s highly ironic in the sense that he can say something and not mean exactly what he’s saying. But on the other hand, he’s so consistently ironic that he wears his irony on his sleeve. He uses footnotes in clever and sometimes naughty ways. He insinuates things that maybe, someone else might say more plainly, more directly.
At the same time, it’s not really that he’s hiding anything. It’s very hard to read The Decline and Fall and get the sense that here is a pious believer, right? He presents himself with a certain skeptical persona that I don’t know that I look in the text for an esoteric teaching per se. It’s much more of a playful way of relating to the reader and insinuating certain conclusions with a certain degree of confidence that the reader will draw out what he means.
Now, does he think that Christianity is responsible for the decline and fall of the Roman Empire? This is a great issue to talk about with readers and scholars of Gibbon. My read on him is that if you were to ask him, “What is the cause of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire?” Way down on the list would be the rise of Christianity. I think Gibbon thinks that the cyclical theory of history (that he develops in the essay in the early 1760s) basically does most of the explanatory work in accounting for the fall of the Roman Empire.
He says as much in the “General Observations,” which is this wonderful little text that he puts right between the decline of the empire in the West in volumes one through three and the decline in the East in volumes four through six.
He has this short text, “General Observations on the Fall of the Roman Empire,” where he says that the cause of Rome’s fall was “immoderate greatness.” Immoderate greatness! In other words, every empire before Rome and every empire since extends itself beyond a point that it can maintain and then falls apart when harder, hungrier, and tougher people come and invade to take the things that the empire has won. That same pattern applies here.
I think the way he tells the story of Rome, particularly in that first volume that comes out in 1776, illustrates that theory very well. He has 16 chapters. For the first 14 of them, he tells the story of the Roman Empire from the “Age of the Antonines” in the second century all the way to the “Age of Constantine” without mentioning Christianity, for all intents and purposes. A few little blips in the footnotes, but basically nothing. He keeps the story of the rise of Christianity offstage until he gets to those final two chapters of that first volume.
Now, why does he do that? On my reading—which is definitely not shared among every reader of Gibbon—he wants to show you that the Roman Empire is falling apart, is well into its decline, is ripe for being invaded, long before Christianity makes any measurable impact on its trajectory.
What is Gibbon’s view of religious experience as he depicts it in his characters?
The thing I find most surprising in Gibbon is when you start from the assumption that he’s going to be doing an account of religion that’s like Hobbes or like the Epicureans or whatever, rooted in fear. The idea is that we can explain away religion by thinking about the terror in the religious soul, right? The fear of God intervening in history or in the afterlife and punishing people or something like that.
Gibbon definitely thinks the passion of fear has a lot to do with accounting for why people are religious, but he has a remarkably broad psychology of religion that includes fear, but also includes wonder, curiosity, gratitude, the sense of just trying to understand the whole and where I, an individual, fit within it.
A lot of these passions that would be natural to assign to philosophy, Gibbon generously attributes to religion too, and I think that makes him a very good thinker to think about religion with someone who’s alive not only to the way that fear leads to religious experience, but a whole range of nobler emotions in addition to fear.
Are there parallels that he at all makes between the Roman Empire and today, or does he hold off from that? Does he go by analogy or goes again by more by disanalogy?
Yeah, so this is one of the most remarkable things about this text, particularly when we’re reading it in this 250th anniversary of volume one: 1776.
It would stand to reason that Gibbon has the greatest crisis in the history of the British Empire in view when he is writing The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. This is a very common way to read him today. It certainly was when he was writing, too. What do we learn, his British readers might ask, about the fate of our empire from the greatest empire in history, the Roman Empire?
Gibbon is extraordinarily reluctant to draw any parallels between modern empires and ancient empires. He serves in Parliament from 1774 to 1784 with a 10-month involuntary sabbatical in the middle when he’s voted out for a little bit, but 10 years give or take during the heart of the crisis over the American Revolution.
He’s in Parliament during all of the great debates about what the British should do. He knows most of the key players. He has dinner with Lord North. He’s watching these debates. He’s reading all the pamphlets. And yet, in this great work of over a million words, there is hardly anything that even alludes to what’s going on with the British Empire and America. So it’s a really stunning thing. What exactly then do we learn about the modern world from this?
Now, there’s one place where Gibbon takes on that question head-on and says, “Okay, let’s think about what we learn about the modern world from the story I’ve been telling you.” And that’s in this little text, “The General Observations,” that I’ve mentioned before. There he says, surprisingly, what we learn from studying Rome is that Europe will not follow the same trajectory that Rome did. It won’t decline and fall. Why is that? He gives a few reasons.
There aren’t as many dark spots on the map. So the Roman Empire would be surprised by these barbarian hordes flowing in. They didn’t know where they were coming from, and so on. That’s not really our case. We have the whole globe in view. We have much better situational awareness out on the frontier.
Technology changes things a little bit, too. So the normal cyclical narrative of hard, tough, poor people taking over from the rich and corrupt and decadent, it doesn’t really work quite in the same way once the soft and poor rich people can develop technology that multiplies their forces many times over and can hold out against even very tough poor people.
But the really key reason he gives—and this is the one I think that’s worth most of our attention—is, he says, one of the remarkable legacies of Christianity spreading across Europe and spreading across national boundaries is that the Europe of his day (of the late 18th century) shares more or less mores, language, culture at the same time that it still has political divisions split into nations.
The combination of those two things, Gibbon says, is an extraordinarily powerful thing. Not an antidote exactly, but it pushes against some of the tendencies of decline because a single nation can decline, fall, get corrupt, and so on, and still another nation can be there to rise and take over take the baton, so to speak. And even when that doesn’t happen, when it’s just national division, the fact that there are many nations competing with one another, Gibbon thinks, is a very useful stimulus to avoid decadence.
There’s something about the way that Europe shares civilization across national political boundaries and yet maintains real division, that Gibbon thinks is an extraordinary source of strength and that studying Rome helps us to recognize and value. So that he doesn’t think we need to worry quite as much as we might about the decline and fall of Western civilization.
The scholar Walter Scheidel, in his book Escape from Rome, makes a contrast between Europe post-Roman-Empire versus the state of China, that after the collapse of the Roman Empire, there were constant attempts to try to recreate it, and they all generally failed on a long-term basis. And thus you had a great variety of nations that led to more dynamic political, economic, and technological development.
Is Gibbon’s argument at all something like that, with regards to Europe, where the collapse of the Roman Empire is necessary for this new world to be birthed? Does Christianity have any positive role to play in the new one according to him at all?
Yes, it does. So he thinks that this shared civilization that he very much participates in and values is a legacy of Christianity, and there’s still a sense in which Christianity supports these shared mores that Europeans have. I think he’s alive to that and can give Christianity credit for doing that.
I don’t think when he’s writing The Decline and Fall that he really has in view any possibility of widespread secularism as a cultural phenomenon. He’s much closer to the wars of religion in the 16th-17th centuries than he is to our concerns about secularism. In fact, when those concerns about creeping secularism come in view, which they do towards the end of his life with the French Revolution, he reacts violently against it.
So he’s an opponent different than Burke, but an opponent of both the American Revolution and the French Revolution, and is shocked and horrified by the French Revolution that when he reads Burke’s Reflection on the Revolution, it’s like a light bulb went off, an epiphany, and then Gibbon, says, essentially, “Burke is writing all of the things that I thought. They are in this book, and I’m so glad it’s there.” So yeah, there’s something of a positive role for Christianity.
I think this analysis—the contrast between the history of the Chinese empires uniting things, not allowing a political division internally, or not at least being able to sustain it in a way that doesn’t destroy the unity—the contrast between that and Europe is really stark, and Gibbon would say the European solution ends up being better in the long term to maintain the civilization and keep it vital.
Now, he frames a similar revolution going on in the Roman Empire when the “Christian Republic” (his term) overthrows Roman polytheistic civil religion. Is he a Burkean when it comes to the Roman polytheism, which he seems to portray as very tolerant and as very accommodating and very enlightened, and he sees more Christianity more like the Jacobins? Is all in the back of his head?
It’s a nice way of putting it, Ryan. Yeah, it is a little bit. Towards the end of his life with the French Revolution in view, he says at one point that when he wrote his account in volume one of the old pagan establishment, he wrote essentially a conservative defense of the established religion against the new upstart revolutionary religion. Essentially, it’s a Burkean defense of paganism. So I think that’s a nice way of putting it, and that it definitely accords with how he describes it.
I will say, though, that if anyone gets just a few chapters into The Decline and Fall, you might think that Gibbon has nothing but positive things to say about Roman civil religion: about the way that Rome empowered magistrates to also be priests, that this looks just so like a wonderful achievement that prevents religion from being harmful politically, and that creates a tolerance in the Roman Empire writ large.
I don’t think that’s Gibbon’s final word on it, and it’s one of the wonderful things he does as an author is he is capable of giving you an impression, which is partly true, and then refining it over time into a different impression. By the time that he starts to account for the rise of Christianity towards the end of that first volume, it turns out that these Roman magistrates are in a way amateurs over against the priests of Christianity.
He says that when he’s accounting for the rise and spread of Christianity. That has to do with five secondary causes. So the first cause is providence. He says that in a pious way once and then doesn’t mention it again. And it seems by and large, we’re thinking about these five secondary or secular causes that are responsible for Christianity’s spread. The five are A) the Christians’ intolerant zeal, B) their belief in an afterlife, C) their austere morals, D) the way they use miracles to get their message across. Then the fifth—which to my mind is the most interesting and I think bears the most explanatory weight—he praises E) the union and discipline of the Christian republic. Now, that’s a very interesting way to account for the spread of Christianity because he adapts terms that he would use elsewhere in accounting for history.
If we’re like, “Why did Roman legions defeat these unwieldy forces?” It’s because the Roman legions are unified and disciplined. They’re professional soldiers or close to it. And so when they go over against undisciplined amateurs, they win. They punch way above their weight. In the same way, he says, the early Christian republic goes against this decadent empire, mot in a political sense, but in a theological religious sense.
This group of people don’t really care nearly as much, don’t believe, with the same kind of zeal that the Christians do in their religion, and the Christians, he says, spread rapidly and conquered the Roman Empire from inside. But you see there that he’s applying a theory of history that he thinks is true: this cyclical theory, that he starts from again as long ago as the 1760s, applying it to account for a shift in religion.
This does two things. It makes this religious transformation open to explanation, we could say, in secular terms. So that looks highly skeptical. It is skeptical. It’s certainly not the account of history that an orthodox believer of this time would use. On the other hand, though, it’s not simply about a corrupt religion taking over or anything like that. There’s something genuinely admirable and in a way reflective of the same virtues that he admires in the active Romans that Gibbon is capable of recognizing and admiring in the Christians.
Does the Christian Church come to at all replace the Roman Empire in any of its institutions or any of its roles? I think you made one point that the priests replace the centurions.
Yeah. Yeah, that’s Gibbon’s analogy. He makes an analogy between consuls and bishops and this sort of thing. Now, is there a degree of irony there? There sure is a little bit of irony. Is there a degree of earnestness, too? Yes, there’s some earnestness, too.
Who are the real leaders? Who’s leading from the bottom? Who’s actually convincing people to believe in things and sacrifice for things? That’s the Christians. When he’s telling the story of their ascent, I think he genuinely admires the great bishops who can speak from the pulpit and inspire people to unify and act together in the world. That’s a really extraordinary thing.
However, in chapters 15 and 16 of volume one—his famous controversial chapters where he talks about Christianity—he gives a very critical view towards the propaganda being put out by the church about its martyrdoms and what it suffered under Roman persecution. There he seems to take a much more minimalistic interpretation.
Is that something that would fit with what you were saying about the hungry republic where propaganda is a necessary part of sort of its rise, the story it’s telling?
Yes. I think he thinks that the inflating your achievements inflating, and also the wrongs that are being done to you, is part of the rise of most powers.
There’s a degree of myth-making that has to do with the early stages, you could say, in political groups, but in religious groups too. He’s deflationary about that. It’s true. He concludes the first volume with a contrast between what he thinks are the proper numbers, let’s say the historically valid numbers of Christian martyrs under the Roman Empire, on the one hand, and then on the other, the number of Christians who died in the religious wars.
He’s against persecution and against a religious war, and wants to put together a story of Rome, I think, that is true, but also allows you to recognize some of the evils that religious belief can give rise to. But he’s also someone who knows the violence of the ancient world and doesn’t intend to cover over that, right? So many different kinds of organizations can be violent, I think, in his understanding of them.
He sometimes accuses ancient historians of taking their own views and projecting their prejudices and their concerns onto the concerns of past times. Examples would be Tacitus or Eusebius.
Does Gibbon at all ever do that, where he takes his Enlightenment concerns or the things he’d have in conversations with David Hume, and puts that onto the past? And if he does so, does he do it knowingly or unknowingly?
Yeah, I think he does it knowingly for the most part. His explanations of the economics of the Roman Empire are mostly his. He’s interpreting ancient evidence, obviously, but is he using some of the kinds of analytical tools that he would talk about with Hume and his friend Adam Smith? Absolutely, I think he’s doing that.
He also, though, genuinely admires and tries to emulate ancient historians like Tacitus, and I think he thinks that most of what Tacitus is doing, which he calls “philosophical history,” can be revived and modernized, and so what he’s doing is partly using certain analytical tools that other Enlightenment historians have available to them, but also reanimating the spirit of the ancient historians like Tacitus and trying to do the same sort of thing with a view to a period of history that they didn’t know about.
Your insight into his famous line about when the idea of The Decline and Fall came to him was an innovation on two different literary forms. One was the travelogue, as you point out, and one was the religious autobiography. But he has a twist on each of them. Can you tell me a bit about that?
Yeah. So he’s writing at a time when this tradition that privileged English young men like Gibbon would go on a tour of the continent that that ended in Rome. This was meant to be the capstone of their education.
And we have many literary accounts of what this is, some from people who are trying to promote the Grand Tour, and others of aspiring authors who are trying to use it as an occasion to write and reflect on on their experiences and the legacy of antiquity. So Gibbon, when he writes his Memoirs at the end of his life, tells the story of his Grand Tour, and I think is consciously responding to some of that literature.
That one of the fears of those critics of the Grand Tour had been that it might lead to conversions. It’s culturally a little bit fraught to send these elite Protestants and future rulers of England to the heart of Catholicism, at a time when these confessional controversies are very serious. So Gibbon, I think, is playing a little bit with that with some of those themes when he tells his conversion story as the culmination of his own Grand Tour.
That passage comes out very out of left field in his Memoirs. He’s talking about how hard it is to be a traveler, and then all of a sudden, he says, “And this is where the idea that came to me.” Is he doing something secretive there? Can you tell me a bit about that point in the Memoirs, and tell me about more about the Memoirs generally?
The memoirs is a fascinating text. I think the best way to read it is one edition that I know of anyways that presents it in the way that Gibbon left it, which is six separate drafts of the memoirs. So this is an extraordinary thing. It was over the course of five or six years after he had finished The Decline and Fall that Gibbon sat down and tried to write this.
He wrote six very different versions, actually, where we can see him wrestling with how he wants to tell his own story. He does not edit them. He does not redact them. There’s no single authoritative memoirs from Gibbon’s hands. There’s some debate about whether he even intended it to be published. Here, I’m borrowing on the work of the great Gibbon scholar, David Womersley, who’s gone through the different editions and thought a little bit about the different contexts they’re responding to in the years that Gibbon wrote them.
But there seems to be one edition of the memoirs that he intended, if he finished it, to be published in his lifetime. The rest of them were intended to be published posthumously. But it is an interesting thing for someone who wrote as fluently as Gibbon did, and particularly in the later stages of The Decline and Fall: he seemed not to do a ton of editing on his work. He really was an extraordinarily prolific writer.
With the Memoirs, it was a slightly different thing where he was struggling to figure out the right line of approach to his past. I think partly some of that had to do with the fact that the world had changed pretty significantly over the course of his life, particularly with the French Revolution. Figuring out how to tell your story, when the way your words are going to be received might change pretty significantly because of what’s going on around you, is a challenging thing to do.
Do you think the Memoirs is, like “The General Observations,” a hermeneutical key to seeing The Decline and Fall as a whole?
Yeah, I think so. I find the fact that we have six different drafts of it to be a really remarkably inviting and stimulating feature of the way he left that work, because we can see him trying to make sense of his own life and of his own work, and we can see different approaches that he takes.
So I find it, yes, very useful precisely because it is unfinished, and he gives us many different varieties that we have to wrestle with of what the ultimate meaning of what he did was.
Throughout your reading of Gibbon, alongside your insight into the famous passage, what were the things that surprised you the most?
I didn’t expect to like Gibbon and admire him as much as I do. So one of the things that I make more of than I think most readers of Gibbon do is this: the elements of sympathetic portrayal of religious experience that I find at least have been underrated in interpretations of Gibbon.
I also find it remarkable how, for all of his scholarly propensities—and you would not mistake Gibbon, looking at him, for a man of action, a great war leader, or anything like this—in his early 20s, he was in the Hampshire militia during the Seven Years’ War, and did a good stint of military training and read some Homer in his tent. That was part of his life. He was a member of Parliament for almost 10 years. There’s an active side to his life, too.
When he goes to write the history that he does, he is someone who knows firsthand what it’s like to participate in military drills, what it’s like to be present at least during great political debates in legislature. He’s someone who knows what it’s like to go through a religious conversion, and to break radically with your family over a matter of conscience. That’s something Gibbon has lived through.
I find it remarkable that this person can take those experiences as formative of the mind that can look on Roman paganism and patriotism in a sympathetic way and an admiring way. He can, at times, look on religious experience in something like that way, too, and yet Gibbon can be someone who stands apart from both of those things, both the patriotism and the faith, and yet can engage sympathetically with both of them. To my mind, that’s an extraordinary achievement.
When we think about the best that an enlightened, Enlightenment-era mind, can be it’s something like that, right? The ability to have detachment and give a sympathetic account of the way that human beings work from more of a philosophical perspective and not an engaged partisan perspective. So that’s something I really admire in Gibbon. He manages to do it with an extraordinary style, too, that I find very admirable.
You wrote an essay a few years ago for The Point on “The Soldier and the Citizen.” Can you tell me a bit about any insights you might have from your reading of Gibbon?
Yeah. So I wrote this essay reflecting on soldiers and citizens starting from Gibbon’s Decline and Fall. I have the honor of teaching at West Point, the US Military Academy, and get to read books like Gibbon’s Decline and Fall, Plutarch’s Lives, and a lot of great works of political thought, with cadets—young men and women who’ve decided to go to a very challenging school that tests them not only academically, but in terms of their leadership and their military skills, and that promises to transform them into leaders of character. That’s the mission of the place.
And sometimes when you teach in that environment, texts hit differently than they would if you were teaching them in another sort of university or college. In my case, I was teaching Gibbon. This was fairly early on with my time writing on Gibbon. I taught a class on how great powers fall, where we read Gibbon’s Decline and Fall.
One thing that my students and I noticed in reading it was his account of the Roman military, and he describes a process where citizen soldiers who served in the legions under the Republic over time became professionals; and the language he uses: he says at one point that serving in the Roman legions was degraded into a profession.
Now, officers today take great pride in their professionalism, as they should. Here was Gibbon using the same word and similar concept to describe a sign of the decadence of Rome, that it was falling into a state where its military was a distinct enterprise with its own interests and so on.
This provoked remarkable exploration of the text, like in what cases is a professional army a sign of civic health? In what cases is it a sign of some degradation? How do we use this Roman transformation that Gibbon’s trying to capture and hold it up to our own experience?
And so I wrote an essay exploring that, about the extent to which the American military is still a military of citizens and the extent to which it’s a military full of individuals with motivations that are different than those of the citizen soldier. And I’ll say, I think it’s not properly understood how much the old civic motives matter for military service in America at any rate.
I think sometimes the language that scholars of civil-military relations and defense studies use to think about what an officer and what a soldier is focus a little too much on the similarity between being a military officer and being a doctor or a lawyer or whatever it is. They say they align it with the other professions and would do better sometimes to focus on the distinctness of it, the way in which armed service is a particular expression of citizenship. I think that still matters. Gibbon calls our attention to it.
Is that the main reason students should read Gibbon today, or are there other reasons as well?
There are so many reasons you should read Gibbon, right? So many good reasons. Yeah, look, I got into Gibbon because I wanted to know how the story went from about the 2nd century to about the 15th century. That’s a perfectly fine reason to read Gibbon, right? He still puts that into one narrative. You can read it just because it’s beautiful.
That’s the way that Churchill got into it, for instance. He was out there in India, was looking for a good book to read, had Gibbon, and just fell in love with the style of it. You can see echoes of Gibbon’s style in Churchill’s beautiful sentences, both in his histories as well as his speeches.
You can read it out of admiration for Gibbon. That’s why Iggy Pop read it. To speak of more illustrious readers even than myself, right? He was impressed just by how sustained and disciplined an exercise of just work The Decline and Fall was, that he wouldn’t stop. Gibbon wouldn’t stop, right? And Iggy Pop used to read this in hotel rooms when he was tired after a concert, and just think about Gibbon writing this work—writing this work every single day for years and years, and then producing this great work.
I think you can read it because Rome is really interesting. As we know, every male at least, maybe every person, thinks of Rome at least once a da. Maybe sometimes more than once a day, right? What better way to think about Rome than to read Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire?
So I think those are all good reasons. For myself personally, as I mentioned just a second ago, the reason I read Gibbon, you know, now having gotten to know him a bit and lived with the work a while, is I really admire his mind, and I think that you can’t but be edified and improved when you spend substantial time with an author who has the kinds of intellectual virtues that Gibbon has.
At the beginning of our interview, you mentioned that it has been 250 years since volume one was published, as well as 250 years since the founding of our country. Do you find any a fitting parallel in those two dates?
Yeah. I wish I could tell you a nice, neat story about this, but I’ll tell you two things that we know for sure. The American Revolution, at least the Declaration of Independence, did not influence the writing of The Decline and Fall, at least the early conception of it. Obviously, July 4th is the Declaration. Decline of Fall, Volume 1 comes out February 17th, 1776. So we have fairly good chronological grounds to say that the Declaration itself didn’t influence The Decline and Fall.
Now, the American Revolution is clearly happening, right? It could be that there’s some influence. We actually have a letter of Gibbon’s that he writes to a friend of his when he first hears news of the Declaration of Independence in mid-August of 1776. And he’s alarmed by it. He’s alarmed, he says, because the Americans have now crossed the Rubicon, and it’s going to be a lot harder to settle this conflict now that they’ve written this Declaration.
Now, so the, did the Declaration influence the writing of Volume 1? It did not influence the writing of Volume 1 anyway, and I think probably didn’t influence much of the rest of it either. Did The Decline and Fall influence the American founders? It did not. They did not read The Decline and Fall, at least going into the Declaration. They were busy doing other things. It took a while for books published in England to get over to America. But it’s actually pretty remarkable how little early reception history there is of Americans reading Gibbon.
The first time anyone really mentions Gibbon in any serious way is when Madison puts together a list of books that Congress should purchase in 1783. The Decline and Fall is on that list. But in terms of sustained engagement, he’s in all the libraries, right? He’s in Washington’s library. He’s in Jefferson’s library. He’s in the Adams family library. That’s actually one of the more interesting episodes because we have, in the editions which you can see in the Boston Public Library of Gibbon’s works, John Adams signs them and John Quincy Adams puts his bookplate on them.
We have John Quincy Adams’ diary when he reads The Decline and Fall for the first time in the mid-1780s, and it’s wonderful because he has the experience that many students will have reading The Decline and Fall, when he picks it up, he starts to read it. He finds it hard to keep going with it just because it’s so large, and we have him saying, “Oh, I’m never going to finish this book. Oh, I have to come up with a reading plan, in order to get it done.” And he records all of this in his diary, but ultimately really loves the book for its style. He thinks Gibbon is occasionally too critical of Christianity and this sort of thing. But that’s in the mid-1780s. So it’s towards the end of revolutionary period that we have any serious engagement with it.
And since this podcast is called “Madison’s Notes,” let me just mention to you that not only does James Madison recommend Gibbon for purchase by Congress in the 1780s, but we also have notes that Madison takes on Gibbon in his follow-up work on the “Notes on Ancient and Modern Confederacies.” There’s a subsequent work he does putting together some notes on that where he quotes Gibbon about the extent of the Roman Empire in a series of essays that he publishes in the 1790s. Some of the preparatory materials has him reading and engaging with Gibbon. So to the extent there are serious readers in the early American period of Gibbon, they’re John Quincy Adams and Madison to some degree.
If Gibbon were alive today and you were interviewing him, what would you want to ask him?
Yeah, that’s a fantastic question. This may be possible at some point with the wonders of AI, right? We could interview Gibbon right now. You should think about that for a special episode of “Madison’s Notes,” interview Edward Gibbon. Why are you talking to me so you can talk to Edward Gibbon?
Digital necromancy.
AI Gibbon. Yeah, what would I ask him? So I think that Gibbon thought in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire that his argument in the general observations that there was something that kept, let’s say, European Western civilization relatively immune to the forces of decline and fall that he thinks moved in Rome.
I would be very curious to see how he would develop that idea today. And I would be curious about it because I think you could make really one of two cases based on his work. I think he could say, still, the forces I’m talking about sharing a certain level of civilization across political division is a very useful way of institutionalizing some of the insights that he’s offered about why Rome fell apart.
It would be a wonderful theory to apply, for instance, to American federalism. What are some of the advantages we have from sharing a national union while also having these sovereign entities we call states, right? A lot of them Gibbon is describing in the “General Observations” describing the European state system.
So this is a very broadly applicable theory. Maybe he would say, “Look, that still holds true, that there’s enough national division, even with our era of post-globalization, that there’s an interaction between that universalism and the national particularity that he can help us understand and help us value in the right way.
That might be one thing. I can also imagine him saying that either the world has been united, the forces that foster this cultural unity across national division have been weakened, but something about the world that he observed in the late 18th century has shifted dramatically such that we have to be worried now about civilizational decline in a way that he didn’t think we had to be in the late 18th century.
I’d be very curious to see which of those two roads, or maybe another one entirely, he would take.
There’s a passage from Peter Brown, Princeton’s local historian of late antiquity, in his memoir, Journeys of the Mind, sitting in front of the bust of Constantine next to a statue of Marcus Aurelius, and he sees this new civilization that has arisen in late antiquity, usually more associated with the Eastern Roman Empire, but a new cultural event that happened.
He’s looking at the dilapidated Constantine statue, and having his own Gibbon moment where he says he always likes going to Rome and musing on the nature and causes of the distance between these two images of two very different Roman Empires, one so very classical, one challengingly late antique: “It is a lesson in the distinctive nature of late antiquity and the mystery of its emergence after classical times as yet another surprisingly creative phase in the history of the ancient world.” He sees something new and dynamic.
Does Gibbon at all see something, a spark that later becomes the modern world, that’s going on here? Where does he see the new civilization that becomes the one that he’s living in? Where does that come from ultimately?
So let me start, Ryan, by saying that this idea that scholars, and people generally, recreate Gibbon’s experience by having a spark and an insight that leads them to do a great intellectual work, is surprising.
Peter Brown is an extraordinary scholar. He was always wrestling, I think, with Gibbon throughout his work. He’s one person who I think of in that vein of someone who’s inspired by Gibbon as a model. Henry Adams is another, right? He writes about his experiences going to Rome and walking on the same territory that Gibbon did, and being similarly inspired towards these historical investigations that he goes under.
So that’s one useful thing I think just to take from Gibbon, actually. It is being alive to the way that these moments present themselves, particularly in odd juxtapositions. So Gibbon has a way as a literary technique of creating these juxtapositions.
He tells at one point in the Decline and Fall the fable of the Seven Sleepers. It’s a Rip Van Winkle story, where some people go to sleep and then wake up much later, and the world has changed completely. And then when you see those two historical periods overlaid on top of one another, it sparks thought. How is it that this world came to be that world?
So what is the spark of modernity? I think for Gibbon, some of it actually has to do with this basic juxtaposition and the question. We are aware of Roman antiquity. We are aware of the Christendom, and of Christian civilization that follows on it. And in the Renaissance, many leading minds in Europe look at those two quite different civilizations and ask the question: how do they relate to one another?
Is it the case that one supplants the other, and then we see a providential design in this? Is it the case that we should understand Christendom just as simply a decline, a corruption, or a negation of what was good and glorious in pagan antiquity, and such that we should try to restore it? Or is there some way in which we have to stand back from both and think about a third possibility that is in some way constituted by the awareness of what we’re doing is partly made up of those two civilizations, but also partly lived in conscious juxtaposition to those two things?
I would say that where I understand Gibbon to be is that he’s in that awareness and juxtaposition mode. He thinks there’s a way of being modern that allows you to understand those two things sympathetically and still say, “We’re doing something new,” in living in a reference to both the pagan Roman ancient world and the Christian Middle Ages.
Last question. At the beginning of his Memoirs, Gibbon says that religion and philosophy both offer hope after death. But then at the end, he has this very interesting line, somewhat mysterious, where he says it’s parents raising their children, it’s Christians or the religious who hope to sing their hallelujahs and hosannas up in the heavens, and it’s authors writing books, who all hope for immortality of some kind.
Can you tell me a bit about that? Why does he have that little switch like that?
Yeah. So he didn’t have any children. He also, I think, did not anticipate singing hallelujahs or hosannas in the sky. He did have his great work, and like Hume and many other writers of this time, was to our tastes a little bit shameless in acknowledging his desire for glory and for literary immortality.
He did not say as, Thucydides did, that he was writing “a possession for all time,” or a work for all time, but I think intended his work to be read widely and for a while after he was gone. I think Gibbon meant to teach people, really meant to educate through his book, and to change the way that people lived in the world and the way they understood their past, as well as the kinds of futures they projected out of their understanding of their past.
By the end of his life, he felt a sense of achievement that he had succeeded in doing that. And so I see his anticipation of that literary glory arising from that notion of what an author is trying to do as an educator more than as a, I don’t know, public relations stunt or a low ambition. He wanted to do something great that would be remembered for a very long time because it deserved to be remembered for a very long time, and we should acknowledge that he did.
Here we are, 250 years after 1776, still talking about this marvelous book that he wrote.
So Rome declined and fell, but the love of glory remains.
I think that’s fair to say.
Professor Liebert, Hugh, thank you for joining me on “Madison’s Notes.”
Thank you, Ryan. I enjoyed it.
