POCOCK[1]. the Transformation of Humanism

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Classical and Civil History

the Transformation of

Humanism

John G. A. Pocock

1. Gibbon in the Memoirsinsisted that from childhood he could never have

been other than a historian [1] , and little evidence has appeared to makeus think otherwise. Yet it is a riddle for his biographers to explain whatwent on in his mind between 1764, when he paid his visit to Rome, and

1774 when he was immersed in writing the Decline and Fall[2 ] ; thisthough there is copious evidence in the form of letters and journals,

records of and commentaries on his reading, critical essays and sketches

of historical projects. It is possible for scholars to disagree, with a vigour

approaching acrimony [3] , on how he shaped his intentions towards hisone major work. The present study is not a biography, and will not commit

itself to the pursuit of these problems. Its intention rather is to establishsome major contexts in which Gibbon lived and wrote, and to employ

these in exploring the significance of what he was and did [4] . The nextgroup of chapters, therefore, will take au pied de la lettrehis assertion

that he was born to be a 'historian', and will enquire what it meant to

practice the activity we term 'historiography' in the culture Gibbon

inhabited.

2. Biographical threads of course run through these enquiries, and a

crucial moment has to be that of the visit to Rome in October 1764. There

is contemporary evidence that this visit was an important experience; he

wrote to his father to say that there had never been such another people


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as the Romans in the history of the world, and that for the sake of

mankind he hoped there would never be again [5 ]. The collision it is nota balance between admiration and condemnation articulates the

essence of the eighteenth century's view of antiquity, and what it meanswill have to be explored again. Alongside this statement in a letter written

from Rome when Gibbon was there, we must place the immortal

Capitoline vision mentioned at the end of the Decline and Falland

asserted again in the Memoirs, where he says he sat musing among the

ruins of the Capitol while the barefooted friars were singing Vespers in the

temple of Jupiter, and the idea of writing the decline and fall of the City

first started to my mind [6 ]. The Memoirsassert that his journal recordsthis incident on the evening of October 15, but in fact it does not, and the

experience may be a creation of memory or a literary invention [7]. Ineither and in any case, it associates Gibbon with a complex of topics

central to the literate mind of his age; it links the theme of Roman

republican and imperial greatness and decay with that of the Catholic

Church's substitution of itself for the empire. Gibbon possessed (we do

not know when he bought) the works of Thomas Hobbes, and may by

1764 have been familiar with that philosopher's characterisation of the

Church as the ghost of the deceased Roman empire, sitting crowned

upon the grave thereof [8] . The second theme led away from the first,towards the late antique, medieval and oriental history which Gibbon tells

us had been among the discoveries of his childhood [9 ], and reminds usthat from the first he had been something more than a classicist. His

letter to his father, and much in the Memoirsbesides, revolve around

Roman greatness and its fall; but the barefooted friars lead inexorably

into ecclesiastical and medieval history the history of barbarism and

religion which classically- trained humanists, especially when their

culture was Protestant, had to study precisely because they disdained itso much. Philosophesmight propose to ignore all Christian history as

unworthy of attention; historians in the eighteenth century, no less than

at other times, knew that they must study it in order to understand how it

had happened. And the history of the city, said to have started to


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Gibbon's mind as he viewed the ruins of the Forum, could not be

separated from the history of both empire and church. This too was a real

tension; in the conclusion of the Decline and Fall, a history of empire as

well as of barbarism and religion which had carried him to the ends of theearth, Gibbon was to write three chapters on the history of the medieval

city as a political, ecclesiastical and architectural structure.

3. The Capitoline vision may be used to explore another twofold theme:

that of the presence of the classical paradigm in early-modern neo-Latin

historiography, coupled with that of its incessant modification [10].Though the Enlightened historians modified and obeyed it in their own

way, the tension within historiography was very much older and can be

traced back to Roman culture itself. To state the paradigm first, in a form

which Gibbon knew and recognised in his writings, 'history' was by a

powerful convention [11] supposed to be a record of the deeds of greatmen, or of great peoples in the persons of their kings, captains and

magistrates, written by the protagonists themselves, or by participants in

or witnesses of their actions, and preserved in writing and in memory. The

writing of history might be an official activity, the work of a priest, scribe

or poet charged with it as his function, or in the polisor republic the

activity of a citizen, who as a protagonist or participant alternatedbetween action and leisure, action and contemplation, action and

recollection. A citizen might choose to write the history of his times,

perceiving like Thucydides that they would be the scene of extraordinary

and exemplary actions; but if he thought them extraordinary, he might be

obliged to explain wherein they differed from times and actions preceding

them, and the concepts of a past and its unlikeness to the present might

begin to appear in historiography. Narrative historians thus composed

might be preserved, and read as records of deeds done of old; and thusthere might appear 'historians' in a new sense of the term, who like Livy

set out to narrate, meaning to re-narrate, the res gestaeor things done

in the city ab urbe conditaor since its foundation, including the especially

significant action of the foundation itself. But only if such a history


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obtained eminent authority would its author come to be recognised as a

historian himself; otherwise he would be not only a narrator of other

men's deeds but a compiler of other men's narratives, and they would be

the 'historians', a title to which he could not aspire. The compilers of theearly 'general histories of England' conflated the works of Sir Thomas

More for the reign of Richard III, Sir Francis Bacon for that of Henry VII,

Lord Herbert of Cherbury for that of Henry VIII, William Camden for that

of Elizabeth I and Lord Clarendon for the Great Rebellion; only in

epitomising and continuing the last did Bishop Kennett take on himself,

with justifiable misgivings, the role and the style of 'historian' [12]. It wasunclear whether 'historiography' was an action fit only for the actor,

soldier or statesman, or for the cleric or scholar whose function was to

record only and not to act; the increasing activity of clerics in medieval or

humanists in Renaissance culture was one cause of the slow

transformation in the nature of 'history'.

4. History thus defined was an antique and classical activity; it recorded

the actions of men in ancient and typically Greek and Roman times and

was written in Greco-Roman style by authors trying to be as like as they

could to ancient authors and ancient actors. One source of 'modern'

historical sensibility was the question of how far a 'modern' could identifyhimself as an 'ancient' simply by imitating the latter's deeds or his words.

It was a military, political and masculine activity; to find a woman writing

it was as rare as Anna Comnena or Christine de Pisan, while to find a

woman's deeds as its subject was rarer still there were few heroines in

war or statecraft between Semiramis of Babylon and Elizabeth of

England. The issue of gender was less crucial in shaping it than the issue

of literacy, or rather of clerisy; were the historians of antiquity men of

action who had turned to writing in their retirement, or were they sophistsand rhetors whose business was words, not deeds, who recorded,

narrated, evaluated and above all verbalised the actions performed by

others? The history of historical writing is in fact a history of

clericalisation, of the steady annexation of action by interpretation until


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the point is reached where interpreters can deny both actors and authors

any existence beyond that which the written and increasingly self-

interpretative word chooses to invent them in; but in the still neo-

classical culture of Enlightenment the heroic model remainedparadigmatic. The historian should be man of action as well as

interpretation, of the sword as well as the pen; the captain of militia had

not been useless (though the reader might smile) to the historian of

empire.

5. Applied in its pure form, the classical paradigm was not more than a

mirror, the miroir des princesin which the deeds of the exemplary

individual were exhibited as they had been in life, to be admired,

condemned, pitied and judged in the memory of posterity; and memory

was not more than the storehouse or theatrumin which the images were

exhibited and the judgments reiterated. These need not be positive; while

glorification was a prime aim of historiography, condemnation was

always an alternative, and in the culture of late-medieval and Tudor

England there were mirrors for magistrates which exhibited repeated

instances of the fall of princes[13]. Edifying as these might be, it waspossible for the Christian imagination which preserved the Greco-Roman

model to question its values. Samuel Johnson, one of the more Christianminds of the eighteenth century, did so in his epitaph for Charles XII of

Sweden.

His fall was destined to a barren strand,

A petty fortress and a dubious hand.

He left the name, at which the world grew pale,

To point a moral or adorn a tale[14]

6. The last line accurately states the objectives of classical

historiography, yet intimates that there is something barren about them.

Charles appears in the mirror as an image of ultimate lack of meaning,


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but this extends to the mirror itself. Because he was nothing but a warrior,

a conqueror for whom conquest had no objective beyond itself, his death

was pure accident, a stroke of fortunamore absurd than tragic; there is

no magnificent meaning jumping out of that, and no point in preservingthe image other than to say so. The futility of his death is its own warning

against itself, and the point Johnson finds in this history is contained in

the title of his poem, The Vanity of Human Wishes. This is a Christian

concept; for classical antiquity the pursuit of glory was magnificent in

itself, and its defeat was tragic. Johnson's insistence on anti-tragedy was

an implied criticism of classical historiography, contained within a

Christian classicism.

7. Even in Greco-Roman culture, however, the classical paradigm did not

operate in its pure form. We are looking here at the origins of 'kings and

battles' historiography to use a phrase favoured by petty-intellectual

criticism of l'histoire evnementielleand la storia statale but the

ancient historians were citizens of republics before they were the

subjects of Hellenistic kings and Roman emperors. They wrote about the

deeds in battle and the civic oratory of archonsand strategoi, consuls

and dictatores, and they knew that the citizen, as captain and magistrate,

lived within a complex structure of laws and values which gave his actionssignificance and which it was his business to maintain. He might, very

rarely, be the founder of such a system, the legislator or pater patriae

there had been conquerors who were legislators, as well as those like

Charles XII who were not he might preserve it against external enemies

or internal corruption, find it too far gone in corruption to be preserved,

or figure as an agent of corruption himself. The system of laws and

values, which was symbolised by the gods of the city and was in a sense

the city itself, thus became a factor if not an agent in the historyperceived and written, and furnished heroic action with a context. Nor is it

the case that to quote another phrase favoured by petty-intellectual

iconoclasm history was invariably written by the victors. Several of the

classic historians of antiquity Thucydides, Polybius, Tacitus and of


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neo-classical early modernity Guicciardini, Sarpi, Clarendon wrote

their histories from the standpoint of the defeated; they wrote to find out

how things had gone wrong, how great leaders had undone themselves,

how the unworthy had triumphed, how great political systems haddecayed and disintegrated. The institutional thus set itself beside the

heroic; it was the city, the monarchy, the empire that gave action

meaning, and the deeds of the individual were judged as the system

made them possible and as they had contributed to the system's triumph,

survival or decay. In this way the laws and values constituting an ancient

political system became factors and agencies in ancient historiography,

and without ceasing to be a record of exemplary res gestae, the latter

became a record of how cities and empires had arisen, flourished and

decayed. It was nothing new for Gibbon to undertake the history of the

decline and fall of an empire, since that was one aspect of what

Thucydides had written, or to accomplish a history of barbarism and

religion, since that phrase would serve to describe what Herodotus had

written. On the premise that the great deeds of the barbarians as well as

the Greeks should be preserved and not forgotten [15] , Herodotus hadfound that this could not be done without detailed accounts of the gods,

kings and customs of the non-Greek peoples of the Persian imperial

system. The problem of ethnocentricity necessarily arose, but it is ourmisfortune if we operate a double standard which damns Herodotus for

colonialism if he depicts non-Greeks as if they were Greeks, and damns

him for colonialism if he represents them as Others. There is something to

be said for the view that he found them fascinating and partly intelligible,

and represented them acting like Greeks in order to outline the ways in

which they acted otherwise. It is the problem of the external perspective;

Sparta and Athens existed in a context dominated by the non-Greek

Persianempire, and Herodotus wrote in order to show how they hadturned back its attempt to colonise them. His narrative thus became an

exploration of the 'culture' (as we should call it) of the Greek cities, and of

its victory over the 'culture', military and political, of the invading empire.

Since we do not have a Persian exploratory narrative of the same events,


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we may seek to invent one [16], or we may enquire whether one hasexisted and we have repressed it; alternatively, if one does not exist,

whether the practice of writing 'histories' in this sense was specifically

Greek and afterwards Roman. In Thucydides's history, Sparta and Athensconfront each other in a universe predominantly Hellenic; the

'barbarians' are marginal to the action, and the question is that of the

survival, victory and defeat of alternative Hellenic systems, which are

maintained and destroyed by the actions of their citizens; the Athenians

do more harm to themselves and others than the Spartans do to them.

An internal perspective predominates; the issue in history is that of the

city's ability to maintain itself, and the Hellenic or barbarian 'others' are

contingent. It can of course be added that a system's power to dismiss

others to contingency is a way of dominating them even when it is not a

way of governing them.

8. The classical paradigm thus depicted the exemplary individual as

acting in a context, and was capable of generating a history of the

context he and others had acted in; this is especially the case of the

transformations of Roman historiography. When we turn from the

'classical' i. e., the pre-Christian central Mediterranean world to the

'neo-classical' i. e., late Latin and Enlightened western European wemake a double discovery: first, that the classical paradigm was still so

prominent that it had been a problem to authors in the generation

preceding Gibbon's that they could not act the role of noble statesmen in

retirement which was central to the writing of accredited 'histories' [17],and was still an occasional problem to Gibbon himself that he could not

write history as the record of exemplary actions [18] ; second, that thehistoriography of contexts, legal, philological, cultural and above all

religious, had developed in a variety of ways to points where it operatedindependently of the classical paradigm, could not be accommodated to

it, and might have annexed and digested it if the latter had not been so

powerful. These phenomena belong to the history of the clericalisation of

classical culture; the rebellion of the 'polite' litesagainst the clerisies is


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part of it, and the debate about the ruditsand the gens de lettresis

another. Were the latter to overthrow the hegemony of philological

scholarship established by Renaissance humanism, and could they do so

without becoming a new ruling clerisy themselves? Gibbon and Humewere among the later though not the last of the gentlemen of letters; in

the next century historians were to be typically professionals and even

professors. In Glasgow and Gttingen, however, the last-named sub-

species was not unknown in Gibbon's time.

9. Arnaldo Momigliano gave the study of Gibbon's historiography its

modern form by observing that his achievement was to integrate

philosophic history with humanist and antiquarian scholarship [19]. Itdoes not lessen Momigliano's point in the least to add that this

integration of both with classical narrative was the commonly recognised

problem of historical writing in the late seventeenth and eighteenth

centuries the debates between ancients and moderns, polite authors

and antiquarians, gens de lettresand rudits, all in their several ways turn

upon it or that the discovery and invention of historical contexts

unknown to classical historians, into which classical histories had

somehow to be fitted, had been going on since at latest the sixteenth

century. A diversity of contexts had been built up, giving rise to theperceptions that structures of human life in the past differed from those

obtaining in the present, that history itself might come to denote the

archaeology of the past and the narrative of its transformation into

subsequent pasts and presents, and that the deeds of individuals and

peoples, Greeks and barbarians, were no longer simply exemplary, but

had to be interpreted as certainly performed in past contexts and

possibly but not certainly active in transforming them into those

which had existed subsequently at present. To confront this set ofperceptions with the classical paradigm is to confront the 'modern' and

the 'ancient' understandings of the term 'history', and it is correct to add

that the Decline and Fallappeared at a time when the two were still

distinct. Gibbon will sometimes write in the classical mode, re-narrating in


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his text what some 'authority' or 'historian' tells him of ancient actions

and actors, while adding in erudite footnotes a commentary which now

and then indicates that he has doubts about what his authority obliges

him to narrate. It is possible to classify his chapter-headings and sub-headings into those which narrate events and those which generalise

about episodes and patterns in historical change. There are here and

there passages in which he pauses to take note of the classical paradigm

and the circumstances in which he regretfully finds it inappropriate.

Momigliano was right to note that Gibbon successfully overcame the

problem of writing both kinds of history together, but did not suggest that

he dispelled it or that it ceased to exist.

10. We have to remember that the classical paradigm was not more than

a paradigm: that is, a model or authoritative programme, which exercised

great power over reality without necessarily existing in an untrammeled

form. Among the exemplary individuals whose actions were recounted,

there had been legislators who founded cities among the barbarians at

least, there had been prophets who had founded religions and these

had given human life new laws, new forms, and new structures which had

made some peoples different from all others. There was a canon of such

founders: Theseus, Lycurgus, Solon, Romulus, Cyrus and by a dangerouslyimportant elision Moses; and these were remembered not because they

taught philosophy by their examples, but because they had changed the

world by instituting new systems of law. There were those remembered

because they had furthered, or momentarily arrested, or tried and failed

to prevent, the decay and corruption of the systems the legislators had

founded Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus, Marius and Sulla, King Josiah and

Judas Maccabaeus and these could be viewed ironically or tragically, as

agents whose deeds had had paradoxical results. There were also those Caesar, Augustus, Constantine, Justinian remembered with profound

ambiguity, because they had transformed the intelligible world under the

guise of preserving it, in ways which could be evaluated both negatively

and positively, and in either case divisively. In examining these cases, we


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pass from the antique to the late antique, from the ancient to the

modern, and from the classical to the neoclassical; but the cases are for

the most part Roman, and we do not leave behind the historians who

wrote according to the classical paradigm. From Livy and Tacitusthemselves, Roman historical memory was not simply of triumph and

domination, but of decline and fall, and the latter if not also the former

phenomena occurred in a world of structures and contexts, as well as of

heroes and examples.

11. Ancient historiography, however, was only in a limited degree

antiquarian or scholarly, and to understand the genesis of 'history' in its

modern form we have to examine the growth of clerical elites who

excelled in the resurrection of past contexts, with which the narratives of

past deeds came to be surrounded. It is important to bear in mind that

this was not necessarily what the agents in building these elites saw

themselves as doing or aimed at doing. We have, in other terms, to

investigate the growth of contexts, built up by a diversity of actors

pursuing a diversity of objectives, but ending in each case in the

construction of a highly textualised tissue of words, perceptions and

institutions, constituting a past state of affairs in which historical actors

came to be seen as operating and which came to be seen as having ahistory of its own. Increasingly, each such 'context' came to be

accompanied by an elite of ruditspossessing the specialised knowledge

and critical techniques necessary to interpret it; and a point came to be

reached at which 'history' as we use the term was written by these

elites, studying the formation and transformation of past contexts, and

not by 'historians', as the authors of classical narratives, past and

present, continued to be known.

12. This is the problem of 'humanism and historiography', examined in a

recent study of the subject [20] . By 'humanist' a notoriouslycomprehensive term is meant those who published, annotated and

criticised the texts, first Greco- Roman and classical, later neo-Latin,


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vernacular and medieval, inherited by western European culture from its

various pasts. They were composed of diverse groups, with diverse skills

and objectives. If they had anything which was common to all, it was a

concern with the past states of language, in the first instance Greek andLatin when in the condition of supposed perfection which was

characterised as 'classical': Greek when it was Attic, Latin when it was

Augustan, though a valuable study of the 'invention' of the 'classical'

could be, or very likely has been, written. They often carried their

insistence on classical canons to the point of fanaticism there were

those who rejected the whole New Testament on the grounds that the

Apostles wrote impure Greek [21] but a crucial moment was reachedwhen classicism proved to be self-defeating and it was discovered that

no 'modern' could write the Greek of Demosthenes or the Latin of Cicero,

still less make it the living language of his own culture, no matter how

long and diligently the ancient styles had been studied and practiced

there. Language thus became the means of reconstituting a past state of

the culture, and at the same time of distancing the past from those most

committed to reconstituting it; while the very hopelessness of pursuing

language to its 'pure' or 'classical' condition led to the discovery that

language itself had a history and could not be divorced from its contexts

[22]. By a complex series of reactions and backlashes, the defeat of pureclassicism led scholars to interest themselves in language in its non-

classical or 'barbarous' conditions: in demotic Greek or late and medieval

Latin, in the romance vernaculars derived from Latin, or in the altogether

un-Mediterranean languages in Latin Europe typically Germanic,

Gothic or Anglo-Saxon which had established themselves as the means

of certain types of expression. For theological and ecclesiological

reasons, there were those who studied Hebrew, Aramaic, Syrian and

Arabic, and sought to decipher Egyptian inscriptions, though a complexof attitudes, Christian, anti-clerical and what we now call 'orientalist',

kept these studies apart from the 'humanist' mainstream. By a further

series of responses, certain modern languages Italian in its Tuscan

form, French in its Parisian, English in its Georgian or Augustan aimed


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at 'classicisms' of their own, imitating or emulating the Greek and Roman

models, and consequently making discoveries about their own 'Gothic' or

'polite' history, and comparing the present state of their culture with the

'barbaric' or 'classical' past.

13. 'Philology' like 'grammar', usable as a collective term for the whole

corpus of textual studies thus became capable of providing a world of

contexts within which the classical paradigm must operate and by which

it came to be modified. By the mid-eighteenth century, however, it had

not replaced the continuingly powerful classical paradigm and was not

necessarily seen as competing with it; historians moved back and forth

between the two styles, alternating between narratives of action and

studies of personality on the one hand, examinations of structures and

their change religion, law, literature, manners on the other, and

allowing the two to interact as their pens led them. We shall find that

Gibbon continued in this dual mode to the end of the Decline and Fall, and

that his doing so had something to do with the maintenance of a still

partly aristocratic lifestyle and its ideology. Nor would it be sufficient to

confront the 'old' or classical historiography with a 'new', based on the

humanist recovery of texts and contexts. There was a third presence, and

therefore a third contestant, in the relationship. The Neapolitan visionaryGiambattista Vico as is usual with Vico, we have to add that his writings

could have been known to Gibbon but to all appearance were not

declared that philology, rather than philosophy, furnished the keys to

truth, and that history was a series of poems in which the human species

had inscribed and enacted itself. To understand Vico's claim, we should

have to address the standing and meaning of the term 'philosophy', and it

is no less important to do so if we confine ourselves to the less daunting

task of understanding other historians of the age.

14. 'Philosophy', as a generic term, denoted the whole field of the human

mind's knowledge of reality, up to and sometimes beyond the point at

which reality became the knowledge of God. It included and in principle


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subsumed the study of the processes of knowledge themselves, and a

central component of Enlightenment was the apparently, and sometimes

really, humble claim that the human mind should confine itself to the

study of its own workings and the limited range of knowledge open to it;the philosophical and historical problem of Enlightenment is the extent to

which this claim to set limits to the mind's powers in fact expanded them.

'Philosophy' rendered the study of the human and the moral sciences the

study of 'nature' and increasingly of 'human nature', and the problem in

understanding the character of 'historical' thought in the eighteenth

century is to determine the extent to which the study of the increasingly

rich context of changing conditions of human life, which 'humanism' and

'philology' had been bringing to light for two or three centuries, was still

contained within the study of 'nature' or was escaping from it to the point

where 'history' became an autonomous mode of knowledge. Gibbon, like

Hume, continued to maintain the unchanging character of 'human nature'

and 'the human mind', but this was rather a key to understanding the

infinite diversity of its products and the forms it had assumed in the

course of history than a means of reducing them to the operations of

invariable laws. The word 'laws', however, is crucial because of the

plurality of its meanings. No branch of 'humanism' or of 'philology' had

been more fecund in the revelation of past contexts than the study ofsystems of law, whether Roman, barbaric or exotic; and just when

humanist philology was making the discovery that Latin could be spoken

with purity only in a purely Roman world, humanist jurisprudence had

been making the same discovery with regard to the practice of Roman

law [23] . The study of the 'laws and customs' of diverse societies was thestudy of as many societies each in its historical uniqueness, for the

reason that law organised the fabric of social living in its entirety to the

point where each law could be practiced only under the conditions whichit had itself organised, and it could be said that human beings without

losing their common underlying 'human nature', nevertheless became

distinct cultural, psychological and even moral beings as a result of living

in societies distinctively organised by their 'laws'. This perception, while


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vital to the humanist and philosopheinvention of 'history' in the modern

sense of the term, was in itself ancient, resting on the Greek and Roman

principle that the user was transformed by the usages and acquired a

'second nature' which was the product of the usages, customs andmanners of a particular social formation. It was of great importance that

ancient, as well as modern and exotic, systems of law were perceived as

being partially or wholly based in custom, mos or consuetudo: it could

thus be said that a people or nation was what it was by virtue of having,

or having had, its own customs, which were not those of its neighbours,

and could not be governed, other than despotically, unless governed by

these customs operating freely [24].

15. These perceptions entailed both material and moral reality. In

societies primarily agrarian and secondarily commercial or governed in

such a way as to entail the ideological assertion of these priorities one

of law's principal functions was to regulate, describe and inscribe the

occupancy of land, and the notion of 'property' originally denoted the ties

which 'law' declared to link the individual to the land and define his being

as that of an individual so linked. Some individuals were so far bound to it

as to become objects in which other individuals had 'property'; others

became 'proprietors', meaning individuals whose 'rights in', 'to', or 'over'land, beasts, goods and other individuals made them 'free' in the sense of

having access to the law and a capacity to claim, assert, vocalise and

inscribe a place in its processes which defined their autonomy. This

capacity was generalised and philosophised until it became a moral

claim, an assertion of capacity for both autonomy and sociability; and

one of the central assertions of Eurocentricity, as far back at least as the

sixteenth century, was the assertion that only in Europe had the

interaction of barbaric freedom with Roman jurisprudence[25]

producedthe free tenures protected by law which had made the European free,

sociable, dynamic, expansive, and capable of assuming moral

responsibility for his own actions capable, in short, of libertas et

imperium. A great deal of what we call 'materialist' social thinking


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originates in the exploration of the propositions that personality is rooted

in property, society in the earth and its products, spirit in matter, the

Logos in the Flesh.

16. Jurisprudence became the main source of scientia civilis[26] in thematerial, institutional, moral and therefore philosophical senses of the

term, because it furnished the richest and most comprehensive set of

vocabularies for describing and regulating the full range of man's life in

civil society. (The term 'man' is used deliberately, because the

jurisprudence of gender, in so far as such a thing could be said to exist,

operated to exclude women, not from society, but from property,

citizenship, visibility and history.) During the seventeenth century, and

running on into the eighteenth, occurred the revival of natural

jurisprudence often under Remonstrant and Arminian auspices which

tended to supply a morality of social living, in the place of a theology of

grace, as the chief instrument of human happiness here and hereafter;

we have seen how this was the instrument by which enlightenment

replaced wars of religion, especially in Protestant cultures. The scientia

civilis, based on philology and enlarging its scope as it supplied an

increasing wealth of contexts in which life was conducted and actions

recorded and evaluated, became at the same time the dominantvocabulary of both morality and soteriology, approaching the point at

which the incarnate God himself must be understood as a social and

historical being. The science of man became a science of nature and

society, and there arose schemes which depicted the generation of

society itself in the course of nature. If there had been a time in nature

when men existed but society did not it was easier to depict this in

terms of pre-Christian philosophy and jurisprudence than in those of the

Hebrew and Christian scriptures such schemes were in a sensehistorical; but they tended to employ concepts of nature universal and

abstract enough to be incompatible with that reconstitution of specific

contexts in the past which is of the essence of post-classical history. This

is why it was supposed, for so long that the assumption is not yet


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eliminated from our minds, that schemes of natural jurisprudence were

by their nature unhistorical, and that a mental revolution against their

paradigmatic domination was necessary before the human being could

discover his being in history.

17. As against this, however, we have been increasingly aware of

processes in early modern European thought through which the genesis

of society became historically specific and both incorporated and

generated those contexts of past culture on which historical thinking is

founded. Jurists supposed a 'state of nature' in which property and law

did not yet exist, and went on to hypothecate processes rooted in human

nature in the raw, by which appropriation could be said to have occurred

[27]. In an important conceptual move, however, widely distributed andperhaps unthinkingly performed, they connected these processes with a

scheme first found in Greek and Latin poetry and cosmogony, which

depicted primeval humans first as gathering the fruits of the earth and

hunting its animal inhabitants, then as learning to domesticate its beasts,

next to cultivate its soil for vegetable products, and finally to exchange

these products through invented metallic media 'money the medium of

exchange'. In this marriage of the poetic imagination with natural

jurisprudence the process could be accommodated to the Book ofGenesis only by supposing post-diluvial man to have regressed to a 'state

of nature' are to be found the origins of those 'stages of history', two or

four in number, which dominate so much in the increasingly historical

jurisprudence and scientia civilisof the eighteenth century [28]. Changesin the philosophy of law and the theological and epistemological

perceptions of human nature did so much to facilitate their growth that it

can be studied as part of the history of philosophy, but this is not quite

the same as the history of that contextualisation of the past which is hereconsidered as central to the history of historiography. Here processes

must be discovered which led to the identification of these abstractly

conceived and universal stages with specific societies or conceptualised

past stages of societies actually existing. A crucial role must be assigned


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to the identification developing slowly after the Spanish encounter with

some but not other Mesoamerican peoples of the solitary and feral

existence of wandering individuals or male-headed patriarchal groups,

imagined by Greek poets and philosophers as the condition of theCyclopes, first with the human condition in the 'state of nature', next with

the small kinship-based societies, sometimes in or near to a hunter-

gatherer economy, encountered or invented by European voyagers and

settlers in various parts of the globe. In this way occurred the momentous

and destructive invention of the 'savage' and the identification of the

'state of nature' with the 'savage condition' imposed upon specific

peoples in lands, outside Europe, and now and then within it [29]. Theancient literary invention of the 'wild man', 'man of the forests', selvaggio,

sauvageor orang-utan[30] was conflated with the jurists' conception ofthe 'natural man' or man in the 'state of nature', not yet humanised by

appropriation or the invention of law or extended social relations; and the

resultant construction was imposed upon a great many human societies,

supposed to be mere hunter-gatherers because they did not practice

agriculture by the individualising instrument of the plough. Such societies

were supposed to be living in the 'state of nature', not yet fully humanised

as individuals; and the effects of this supposition, very often devastating

for them, greatly enhanced European societies' consciousness of theirown historicity. Navigation, colonisation and commerce organised large

sections of global humanity into the increasingly if misleading concrete

stages invented by the scientia civilis.

18. Concurrently with this development, but in ways that situate it more

intimately interior to a European consciousness of history, occurred the

growth at the end of the seventeenth century of a sense of almost

revolutionary modernity in the public and theoretical languages ofseveral societies of Europe's northern Atlantic seacoasts, as they

succeeded in putting behind them an era of religious wars. They saw

themselves as distinguished by the growth of credit structures which

facilitated the state's control of armed force [31] , and by a post-fanatical


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form of religion which put an end to unreal perceptions of God as

immediately present and made virtue and even salvation an affair of

practising the usages and values of civilised society. They grouped these

changes together under the paradigm of 'commerce', and expressed anacute awareness of the distance which 'commerce' established between

'modern' society and its Christian, feudal, barbaric and even classical

predecessors. The relations they were able to affirm between themselves

and the first and last of these four were especially crucial to their self-

understanding and self-evaluation, and it has been suggested that this

was the point at which Western man for the first time saw his history as

paradoxical, entailing both secular gain and cultural loss [32] . Neo-classical in their continuing admiration for Greek and Roman values, they

perceived not only as had their Renaissance predecessors that they

could not re-create the life of ancient society, but that their neoclassical

values themselves commanded that they should not attempt to do so.

There thus arose 'quarrels of the ancients and moderns', in which some

claimed a modern capacity to achieve ancient values more fully than had

the ancients themselves, and others laid claim to values which surpassed

and negated those at which the ancients had aimed; while the capacity to

criticise modern society in the name of ancient values was by no means

extinguished [33]. The succession of past contexts to one another,around which the concept of a civil history was taking shape, became

increasingly exposed to conflicting evaluations, and the process of

historical change was perceived in correspondingly sophisticated terms.

19. We are outlining some of the processes by which there took shape in

the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries a 'civil' and even a

'philosophical history', with which 'history' written according to the

classical paradigm, persisting in a deeply neoclassical culture, had to co-exist and continued to contend. A crucial late step in its development was

the advent of ethical and aesthetic schemes of 'manners' and

'politeness', denoting codes of human interaction, partly courtly and

partly civic in origin, which linked the Ciceronian and Senecan codes of


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beneficial exchange in ancient society with those of modern 'commerce'

a term which denoted exchange of services, manners, ideas and values,

as well as of material goods. These codes were neither heroic nor

transcendent, but were consciously limited to the conduct of the existingsociety and its culture. It came to be affirmed, however, that in an epoch

when 'commerce' here very much in the sense of 'trade' had been

more highly developed than in any which had preceded it, a 'politeness'

often identified with 'taste', 'science', and the epistemologies of Locke

and the third earl of Shaftesbury, could flourish in ways to which all

previous history, organised into 'stages' of the growth of 'commerce',

served as the introduction. It became possible for Voltaire to propose

rewriting history, not as the Esprit des Loisbut in the form of an Essai sur

les Moeurs: for Burke to declare that manners were more important than

laws; for Burke and Ferguson to affirm that a universal commerce of

manners distinguished modern Europe both from Asian civilisation and

from that of ancient Greece and Rome [34] .

20. We cannot understand the philosophy of manners without

comprehending the extent to which they were designed to replace the

attempt of a Christian civilisation to live directly by spiritual values; and in

the setting of the present chapter, this means that we must retrace oursteps and examine the Christian impact upon history written according to

the classical paradigm, as well as the relation between Christian history

and the modern historiography which was designed to replace classical

and Christian alike. The classical paradigm defined 'history' in terms of

exemplary deeds in war and statecraft; it had an extensive moral

dimension and could narrate and evaluate the protagonist's deeds in

terms of justice and legislation as well as exemplary prowess; we have

seen that within its structure, 'history' could become the birth, growthand decline of a society or a system of laws. Yet its morality was secular

and this-worldly; glory was one of its ultimate concepts; its vision of the

world was political, and its vision of politics heroic. The classical age in

which it was written had not contained the vision of a church, a human


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association formed to live in this world while pursuing values to be

realised only beyond it, an association which extended beyond the living

and even the dead, considered as members of society, to become a

fellowship and communion with God himself, said to have lived on earth ina human body and on his departure to have left his disciples members of

his spiritual substance. It was far from clear how the history of such a

church could be written, and writing history might be a means of

diminishing or replacing the belief in and practice of its existence. The

advent of Christian history was thus a challenge to the classical paradigm

[35] .

21. It was a further problem to comprehend how a churchman,

consecrated as a priest to pursue Christian fellowship and communion

with God, could figure as a historian given the sense in which the

classical paradigm defined that term. He was not primarily a citizen; the

alternation between civic action and leisurely retirement, in which history

was written and which was central to the understanding of what history

was, meant nothing to him. He might be a celibate, even a monk,

separated by vows from the physical and political being of society; even

as one of the 'secular' clergy, living by definition 'in the world', he lived

there in pursuit of values which were not those of the city or the empire,and church and city might unite in asking him, from polar opposite

positions, why he was writing history at all. It is not easy to call to mind a

case in which she was a nun, one of a community of women pledged to

live out of this world; though given the spread of scholarship among such

communities, even this most scandalous challenge to the classical

paradigm is not unthinkable. Male or female, the ecclesiastical or

sacerdotal historian was mistrusted, as living by values other than those

which commended and legitimated the writing of history; Gibbon oncewrote of a monk, who in the profound ignorance of human life had

presumed to exercise the office of historian [36] . Nevertheless, theexistence and even the legitimacy of ecclesiastical history could not be

denied, given the premise that the church was an association of human


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beings living in the world and its time, as well as a communion of saints or

fellowship of spiritual beings living beyond both. There was, in

Augustinian parlance, a church militant as well as a church triumphant.

The former was in history, and made history as well as suffering itself tobe made by it; if as the orthodox affirmed the former was of one

substance with the latter, history was even shaped by the church

triumphant acting from beyond it. There were those as diverse as

Marsilius of Padua, Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury, and Benjamin Hoadly

bishop of Bangor who laboured to deny the essential unity of church

militant and church triumphant, and presented the former as part of

secular history in no way differing from it; but when these appeared, they

found themselves confronted by a formidable apparatus of sacred and

ecclesiastical history which they must go about unmaking. Hobbes did

this by representing the church as the ghost of the deceased Roman

empire, and by implication little more. We need to understand, however,

what more it claimed to be.

22. God in all three persons existed beyond time and history, but had

acted in time and the history of mankind by a series of acts, distributed

among revelation, covenant, prophecy and incarnation, of which the two

most crucial were the 'old dispensation' given at Sinai which hadconstituted Israel as a people peculiarly God's and the 'new

dispensation' consisting in Christ's incarnation, death and redemption

and concluding in the descent of the Spirit at Pentecost; this had brought

the old Israel to the end of its mission and substituted a new, the church

which was at once a communion of humans in fellowship with God and

one another, and the continued presence of Christ in his mystical though

no longer his natural body. This series of acts, not yet concluded since

more were to come, constituted 'sacred history', the record of God'saction in and upon time, and of time as transformed by that action.

Sacred history could be written and had left its own scriptures to record

it; it was possible for a human author to paraphrase and enlarge it by

means of commentary. Sacred history in the first place consisted of the


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record of action with regard to specific societies: initially the people of

Israel, a community existing among the great empires of Egypt and

Babylon, Assyria and Media, Macedon and Rome; subsequently the

church, a communion local in its origins but held capable of including thewhole of humanity. There were also those to whom God had not

communicated himself directly, but whose history could nevertheless be

traced, ever since the dispersion of the houses of Ham, Shem and Japhet

after the Confusion of Tongues had distinguished them into many

lineages, or gentes, of whom God had chosen to act only through that of

Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Sacred history had as its paired opposite that

which was known as 'gentile history', and the question was whether the

history of peoples not defined by covenant and revelation formed part of

God's action in the world or was consigned to some outer darkness of

merely 'secular' history meaning by that term the 'history' of time

unredeemed by divine action. If so excluded, did the uncovenanted

peoples generate a history significant in their own terms, or was their

existence devoid of ultimate meaning? The easy solution was to bring

them into the story in so far as their actions had affected the history of

God's purposes through, or for, his own people. The prophets of the Exile

had presented the kings of Egypt, Babylon and Assyria as God's

instruments in the punishment of Israel grown false to its covenant withhim, and a history of the ancient Near or Middle East could therefore be

constructed around that of Israel as paradoxically its center a small

and disregarded nation possessing a significance exceeding that of its

enormous neighbours. But the problem grew far more complex when the

history of the first Israel, and then that of the second, encountered that

of Troy, Athens, Sparta and Rome: a history neither barbarous, idolatrous

nor oriental, but documented in incomparable richness by a literature

and sculpture, including a historiography, altogether its own a literaturewhich furnished Christian and Enlightened civilisation with almost all its

cultural models, and appropriated the names of 'humane letters',

'humanity' in the sense of humanitasand 'humane' or 'human' as opposed

to sacred history. The Greek and Roman gentestransformed the question


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of gentile history by rendering the history of unredeemed man the history

of Athens and Rome as opposed to Jerusalem, and enlarging 'classical'

and 'humane' history to a point where it threatened to engulf sacred

history itself. The neoclassical historian could choose to be a neo-pagan,finding the meaning of existence in classical values rather than in

Christian; and whatever his choices, his hand was strengthened by the

circumstance that his history contained that of the Hellenic 'philosophy',

Platonist and Aristotelian, on which a great part of the edifice of Christian

belief and doctrine had come to be founded.

23. The genealogy of the sons of Noah could be employed in tracing the

origins of all the peoples, though it did not replace the creation and

ancestor myths recorded of other gentes, including especially those of

the Greeks and Romans. There arose and was intensified by humanist

scholarship in the fifteenth through seventeenth centuries a

complicated science known as chronology, aimed at reconciling the

gentile accounts of primeval time and the actors in it with those given in

the Old Testament and legitimised by the followers of the New [37] . Of allbranches of premodern Christian learning this is perhaps the most alien

to the post-Enlightened mind; it is full of such propositions as James

Ussher's undeservedly notorious dating of the Creation to 4004 B. C., andidentifications of biblical with non-biblical figures that read more

strangely still; but it was the discovery of geological time in the

nineteenth century which put an end to it, rather than the denunciations

of Jewish chronology by philosopheswho could only substitute some

other or no other, and we shall find that its abandonment produced

immediate effects less startling than might be supposed. However, the

science of sacred and universal history was greatly complicated by the

increasing knowledge, thrust upon Europeans in the age of globalexpansion, of civilisations Indian, Chinese and Meso-American [38] , notto be found in biblical or Greco-Roman literature and possessing

chronologies of their own even harder to reconcile with the Judeo-

Christian than were those of Mesopotamia or still-undeciphered Egypt.


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Some of these chronologies, like the Maya, Europeans did their best to

destroy; others, above all the Chinese, survived, were reported and

presented Christian thought with new problems. It was not merely that

Chinese and Hindu chronologies were excessively hard to reconcile withthose worked out in the Christian-Hellenic-Mesopotamian encounter, or

that China, vaguely known to the ancients, and America, utterly unknown

to them, presented difficulties to the Noachic genealogies. The latter

problem was in fact solved by supposing to our minds not objectionably

that America had been peopled by humans from northern Asia, thus

making both Chinese and pre-Columbian Americans descendants of

either Ham or Japhet. The crux was rather that the newly-discovered

civilisations enlarged and complicated the problem of gentile history, and

so of the identity between sacred history and universal.

24. Gentile history might be excluded from sacred history, on the grounds

that the Lord had not made himself known to the gentiles through

revelation and covenant, and so had not employed or commissioned

them in the fulfillment of his purposes. In that case their history might

have gone on at a distance, in darkness and without meaning; at most

exemplifying the condition of fallen man when grace was not extended to

it. But it came to be held that there was a natural as well as a revealedlaw, and a harmony of some kind between the two; so that the ancient as

well as the newly-discovered gentiles (or heathen) had lived in nature

and according to it, and might be the subjects at least of natural history

meaning investigations of nature not necessarily entailing the written

records of human actions. History was only one of the sciences of man,

and natural jurisprudence in the role of scientia civiliswas increasing the

number of the latter. The gentiles, furthermore, were not excluded from

the providence of a God who was lord of all the earth and must employ allmankind in the fulfillment of his purposes. There was a sense, however, in

which no history of providence could be written; its ways were inscrutable

and past finding out, and became visible, even as mysteries, only at those

points at which they intersected with the record of revealed 'sacred


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history' in the proper sense of the term. Christian chronology, which

flourished in renaissance and baroque forms, was in fact the science of

these intersections; and 'universal history', as laid out by such a master

as Bossuet [39] , was the history of God's actions in the old and newdispensations, written so as to include the history of those gentile nations

who had impinged upon it and acquired significance from their part in it.

Egypt, Babylon, Assyria, Macedon, Persia and Rome had played vital if

hostile roles in the history of the two dispensations, from the Pharaoh of

Exodusthrough Pilate in the Gospels to the Caesars of the persecutions;

and we might think of Bossuet as a Christian Herodotus, aware that the

great actions of the heathens as well as the Jews and Christians must not

be forgotten, and that the history of the former must be written, but more

insistent than Herodotus that it was significant, and therefore intelligible,

only as contributory (through the mysterious wisdom of providence) to

the latter. The history of Islam, however inimically viewed, was visible

from the standpoint of sacred history, though it arose too late to play a

part in the making of the dispensations, and therefore need not be

studied in much detail. But problems of quite another sort arose from the

discovery of civilisations and histories in further Asia and Mesoamerica,

which were not mentioned in either sacred or classical history, could only

be remotely connected with Judeo- Christian chronology, and had playedno part whatever, not even a hostile one, in sacred history as the record

of the dispensations. There were now known to be recorded 'gentile'

histories altogether indifferent to the history of God's actions in the world

unless the latter could be rewritten so as to include them and

'universal history' could henceforth be understood either as what it

meant to such as the compilers of the English Universal Historystudied

by Gibbon, namely an attempted encyclopedia of all the histories of all

the nations so far as they were known, whether they interacted withsacred history or not [40] . There could in principle be a natural, even acivil, history of man, or of human society, written independently of the

Judeo-Christian dispensations; we shall have occasion to note the

savagery with which Voltaire employed Chinese history to displace


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Jewish, and by implication Christian history from any central place. This

did not mean that he wanted to study Chinese history for its own sake,

though there were both Jesuits and philosopheswho did; once he had

achieved his destructive purpose he dropped it, and the Essai sur lesMoeurs, in name an histoire universelle, is in fact a history of Europe.

Modern historiography has been so much a product of Europe's quarrel

with its various pasts that the histories of India, China, Japan and the

peoples without history [41] have yet to be normally included in it, andit is easier to contest the notion of history itself than to write it on a

global scale. Comprehensive histories of the human race for the most

part resemble the original Universal Historyin being libraries rather than

unitary volumes.

25. Sacred history merged into 'ecclesiastical history' at the point where

the church became the vehicle of Christ's presence among his

worshippers, and the several events of divine action in the world became,

as it were, institutionalised in the church's continuing existence, to

endure until the climactic events of the eschataor last days. As time

lengthened in the expectation of these events, it became possible and

necessary to envisage the church's continuity as history, and extend that

vision to include either sacred or gentile history previous to the events Incarnation, Resurrection, Ascension, Pentecost which had established

the church after Christ's physical departure. Ecclesiastical historians were

thus both sacred historians and historians of the church considered as a

human community; the first of them, after the evangelists themselves,

was Eusebius of Caesarea, a contemporary of the emperor Constantine,

considered the founder of ecclesiastical history as a literary genre [42].From him the genre was held to have derived a dual character. In the first

place it was designed drawing on the events of sacred history in thebroader sense to validate the church's continuously acting as the

vehicle, primarily of Christ's presence in the sacraments, secondly of

orthodox truth concerning his teachings and his nature, thirdly of the

authority to administer the sacraments and the word in which he was


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present, and therefore to speak in his name. As the history of the church

became increasingly a history of debate and contestation concerning

Christ's nature, and concerning the distribution of authority among the

officers and ministers of the church in which he was present, the historyof these debates required to be written; but it was written with the aim of

upholding orthodoxy and authority and became in its way a vehicle and

not the only one of tradition. It was still being written in this way by

Bossuet, Tillemont, Fleury and other Catholic ecclesiastical historians in

the generations immediately preceding Gibbon's.

26. In the second place, Eusebius had been the historian of Constantine,

and therefore of the establishment of Christianity as the recognised

religion of the empire: a momentous if not climactic event in both

ecclesiastical and civil history. From this time history became tam

ecclesiastica quam civilis, a narrative of sacred co-existing with secular

history the word 'secular' denoted both time and the organisation of

human life as it was lived in time and the history of the church as we

have seen it emerging became intertwined with that of civil authority and

civil action; a history conceived not merely in gentile but in specifically

Roman and classical terms. The ecclesiastical historian became one of

those who wrote to the requirements of the classical paradigm, but sincehe was a citizen of the civitas Deirather than of the civitas terrenahe had

his own ends in writing and developed his own idiom [43] , and there wasalways something anomalous about his presence in the company of

classical historians. As a minister of the Spirit, what business had he

recounting the deeds of emperors? How did those deeds appear when

performed in the context set by sacred history? As a member of the

vehicle of grace which was above nature and transformed it, was it his

function to hold the mirror of history in which human nature wasreflected? The views one held of the nature of Christ might affect one's

understanding of both ecclesiastical and civil authority, and the process

might be repeated in reverse; neither the emperor Constantine nor his

historian Eusebius had always been orthodox in the debate between Arius


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and Athanasius, and later historians of the church were obliged to record

the partial heresy of the church's first historian [44] . The intensity oftheological debate, and the civil authority's involvement in it, in the age

of the Fathers and the Councils, gave the ecclesiastical historian much torecord that was unedifying and even scandalous, and sacred history

which narrated the actions of the Spirit had at the same time to narrate

the actions of men, even of saints and confessors, in whom human nature

appeared in its least redeemed form. This was inherent in the concept of

the church militant in a still fallen world, and did not in itself challenge

orthodoxy; but it offered a series of tempting opportunities and telling

arguments to those who would recount the church's human and civil

history in ways that challenged its sacredness.

27. During the two centuries preceding that in which Gibbon wrote the

Decline and Fallthe structure of ecclesiastical history as perceived in

Latin Christianity was deeply changed as a consequence of the

Protestant Reformation [45] . For Catholics it remained, with greatlyincreased urgency, a means of displaying the uninterrupted continuity of

orthodoxy and authority in the church that was its continuing presence.

This enterprise heightened rather than retarded the growth of techniques

of textual and other criticism within Catholic scholarship, but these werealways at the service of authority. A crisis had occurred in the late

seventeenth century, when Richard Simon's histoires critiquesof the Old

and New Testaments had aimed to show that the scriptures were less

reliable than the tradition of the church that interpreted them, but had

horrified Bossuet and others who saw Simon as separating authority from

its foundations [46]; to sceptical (but not necessarily unbelieving)onlookers it seemed that Bossuet was determined to have his cake and

eat it. This, however, was primarily a crisis within the discourse of Catholicauthority. Since Luther's own time there had been a Protestant discourse

as it came to be termed [47] which challenged orthodoxecclesiastical history at its roots. A great part of the history of the church

must now be a narrative and explanation of papal usurpation of the


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acquisition by the successors of St. Peter (if that was what they were) of

powers that did not rightfully belong to them; and the problem of the

terms in which this history of false authority was to be written merged

with that of establishing the structure in which Christ's true presence hadbeen maintained during the centuries there were enough of them to

constitute a millennium of the papal usurpation. The simplest rhetorical

device available to Protestant ecclesiastical historians was that of

supposing that since the true church was by definition the presence of

Christ, a structure claiming falsely to act in his name must be the work,

and thereby the presence, of Antichrist a being mentioned in the

Christian apocalyptic writings and now promoted to an incessantly

important role in Protestant historiography. To identify the papacy with

Antichrist was to institutionalise the latter, and furthermore to identify

the greater part of the church's institutional history as his work and his

presence. The visible church was condemned, and the history of the true

church, Christ's true presence, identified with that of the invisible. Christ

had been present in his Word, acting in the hearts of his true followers

oppressed by the powers of this world, including that of the papal

Antichrist. But if the church's institutional structure, including its

distribution of constituted authority, was held to provide the mystical

body in which Christ's incarnation was continued, a strictly invisiblechurch did not furnish him with such a body and might be held to

compromise the doctrine of his incarnation. The history of the church

might come to be a history of recurrent pentecosts, of actions by the

Third rather than the Second Person of the Trinity; a history of the active

Spirit rather than the communicated Son; an antinomian history in which

the institutions of the visible church were always corruptible and normally

corrupt, and the Spirit acted occasionally to maintain the invisible church

whidh resisted corruption. There were many sectarian histories of thiskind, one of them Gottfried Arnold's Kirchen- und Ketzerhistoriewhich

Gibbon did not read at Lausanne [48] .

28. In these extreme forms, Protestant historiography became in the


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eyes of many including many Protestants a history of enthusiasm

and not an ecclesiastical history at all. That is, there were many

Protestants who most strongly desired to remain part of the history of

the visible church and of the continuous structure of its authority sincethe Apostles, the Fathers and the Councils; they desired to remain within

Christ's body, the action in this world of the undivided Trinity, and of the

history of the Logos Incarnate. For such Protestants, the history of the

papal usurpation must be written differently. There were those who

horrified their fellows by denying that the Pope was Antichrist, and of

these some wrote the history of papal authority as an accident of civil

history, an effect of the disruption of the Roman empire and the advent

of the Gothic and Frankish kingdoms [49]. Gallican Catholics, who did notaffirm the papal power a usurpation, but maintained the independence of

the monarchie franaisefrom its jurisdiction, did not write history very

differently; and this was to remove the papal usurpation from the field of

sacred history where it figured as an Antichristian or a diabolic event

into that of ecclesiastical and at the same time that of civil history. By

this route, as by many others, we reach the point at which civil and

ecclesiastical history were seen to interact. The initiator of such a history

was of course Constantine, who like his historian Eusebius was displayed

in a momentously ambiguous role. On the one hand he was an actor insacred history, the imperial prophet who had seen the cross in the sky

and acted by victory in battle to unite Christ's body, the church, with the

structure of empire. On the other hand he was God's flawed instrument,

rather Saul than David; a deeply imperfect being as, to do him justice,

he did not deny who had brought the church into conjunction with the

necessary imperfections of the earthly city, with consequences of which

the almost immediate outbreak of heresy and his own involvement in it

were emblematically the first. Constantine was a contested figurethroughout the medieval debates between church and empire, and the

early-modern debates between the church catholic and the church

reformed; whenever, in short, the conjunction between spiritual and

secular authority seemed imperfect or contestable. To some he had won


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eternal glory by setting up the church in the empire; to others he had

erred by subjecting the church to the empire and enabling emperors to

make unjustified claims on popes and bishops; to others again, he had

erred not merely by enabling popes to make claims on emperors, but farmore deeply by involving the church in the sin of attempting the exercise

of civil government. To many this was the origin of the papal usurpation,

to some the beginning of Antichrist's reign in the church, which had

commenced its thousand-year rule from one or other of Constantine's

donations to the clergy [50] . In the Scots version of a widespreadanecdote:

When Constantine set up Sylvester hie,

On civill seat in his empire of Rome,

This voyce from heaven then sounded michtilly:

Now poyson is pourit out on Christendome. [51]

But if the civil power was among the victims of Antichrist's usurpation, it

might be thought of as maintaining even as acting as the vehicle of

the continued presence of Christ among men. The Christian emperor

might be Christ's captain against his false representative even though,

perhaps even because, Christ had warned Peter to put up his sword; hemight even be Christ's representative, entitled to act in his person, and

the empire rather than the church the vehicle of Christ's reign among

men. When the thousand-year reign of Antichrist was ended, the

thousand-year reign of the saints might begin, with the emperor at its

head until Christ should return in his risen person. Such visions were

articulated when medieval emperors came to Rome intending a reform of

the papacy; they were entertained again when the English king, imperato

in suo regno, took up the cause of the invisible church and a new andpurer Constantine rendered it visible by embodying it in his kingdom.

Such a Protestant emperor might come closer being a 'type of Christ', a

figure of incarnation, than the unbaptised Constantine himself had ever

come.


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29. In the lifetimes of the two generations preceding Gibbon's the

period in which his kind of historical consciousness was taking shape

the rulers of Christian and especially Protestant Europe displayed (as we

have seen) an earnest desire to free themselves from those typified roles

in sacred and especially millennial history which had proved above all in

the British kingdoms so disastrously double-edged a weapon in their

struggle with the papacy. The Gallican Louis XIV found it easier to play

the role of an Augustus than that of a Constantine; his adversary William

III rode a white horse and figured as a liberating and millennial emperor

only in the imagination of Protestant Ireland, being at pains to downplay

the role in that of Britain, Holland and the Huguenot exiles. Bayle

triumphed over Jurieu because it was increasingly an objective amongtheir contemporaries to show that the civil power was obtaining the

ascendancy over the ecclesiastical and putting an end to religious

conflict. Sculptors, painters and historians joined to depict the rulers of

the age in neo- classical garb and baroque settings with the same end in

view; the image of a pre-Christian past in which there had been no church

and no theological conflicts was serving the modern purpose of rendering

civil authority (whether absolutist or constitutionalist) supreme in a

Christian society. Lay authors joined an apparent majority of clericalspokesmen in insisting that sacred history occurred only in the contexts

provided by civil society and its history; as the Neapolitan Pietro

Giannone put it, the church was in the republic and not the other way

round [52] . Pressed in a certain direction, this perception could as wehave repeatedly seen end by depriving the church, and Christ with it, of

any claim to a divine nature. There was nothing unorthodox, however, in

affirming that the church was both a divine and a human society, existing

in both sacred and civil history; and it was often conservative Gallican,

Lutheran and Anglican historians who put forward the argument, which

radical believers and unbelievers could both exploit, that the church as a

human society had been shaped by civil history and had followed the

increasingly complex patterns of its development. There were orthodox

historians who elaborated the history of Christian doctrine itself as


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moving towards just this understanding of its own character, and losing

none of its orthodoxy in the process. In this way historiography acquired

a dual structure, at once ecclesiastical and civil, to employ a phrase

common among English historians between Clarendon and Hume [53];and the two served as contexts to one another. If the history of the

church must in the last analysis conform to that of civil society, the

history of the latter must be understood in terms of its interactions with

the church and its claims to embody the actions of the Spirit in sacred

history, and no amount of 'secularisation' of history would ever return it

to what it had been in pre-Christian antiquity. We have reached the last

and the greatest of the contextualisations and clericalisations which were

imposed on the classical paradigm and transformed it.

30. The classical paradigm none the less persisted with extraordinary

strength. Not only was there a continuous undergrowth of exemplary

miroirs des princes, but the greatest of Enlightened historians Gibbon

among them commented on the sustained pressure they were under to

write classical history and their inability to comply with it or to escape

from it. This predicament can be traced back to the late Renaissance and

the beginnings of the Wars of Religion, if not further. The most admired

'modern' historians those, that is to say, proclaimed to have equalledthe achievements of antiquity were held to have equalled the

achievements of Tacitus [54] ; and when one looks in the Tacitean mirror,one sees not exemplary actions good and evil, so much as the dark and

knotty mysteries of ragione di statoin which the springs of human

conduct are forever obscured and the consequences of human actions

forever unpredictable. One sees Tiberius rather than Scipio, the palace

rather than the forum, and it is possible to argue that history has become

the mirror of ragione di statoand the arcana imperiibecause corruptionand tyranny have prevailed over virtue and liberty; in the history of a true

republic all would be open and intelligible, and the fall of political man

would not have occurred. But the great Tacitean historians admired in the

late Renaissance and the baroque period were concerned with historical


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changes even more complex than the decay of liberty, if like their

predecessors they were the chroniclers of defeat rather than victory.

Francesco Guicciardini's Storia d'Italiawas concerned with the conflict

between Hapsburg and Valois which destroyed the city-state politics ofItaly and was the forerunner of the bipolar politics of the European state

system, and after him the neo-classical masters were historians of

reason of state and wars of religion. Jacques-Auguste de Thou's

Historiarum Sui Temporis libri CXXXVII(1605) was a history of the wars in

France and the Netherlands [55] ; Paolo Sarpi's Historia del ConcilioTridentino(1619) studied the arcana imperii papalisat the heart of the

Counter-Reformation, and advanced a Tacitean understanding of

ecclesiastical politics themselves [56] ; P. C. Hooft's NederlandscheHistoorien(1642) was a history of the Dutch revolt against Spain no less

Tacitean than exemplary [57] ; Lord Clarendon's History of the Rebellion(1702) narrated the civil wars and wars of religion in the three British

kingdoms [58] . All of these were neo-classical histories; they excelledaccording to the canons of the classical paradigm, yet they dealt with

matters above all those of history tam ecclesiastica quam civilis of

which the ancient historians could have had no knowledge at all. They

were the heirs of Eusebius as well as of Tacitus, but were moving into

post- medieval and post-Reformation world whose neo-classicism wasparadoxically the emblem of its modernity. A lesser but unjustly

neglected figure Thomas May, the parliamentary historian of the First

Civil War, who had earlier written verse histories of great medieval kings

[59] explains the difficulty of writing classical history underseventeenth-century conditions. However heroic, actions are not

exemplary when performed in an 'unnatural' civil war; their motivation is

more obscure than even Tacitus knew, when shaped by differences of

religious conviction. Speeches by captains to their soldiers cannot berecorded, even if delivered, in the din of a gunpowder battlefield; and

their place is taken by an exchange of printed manifestoes, unknown to

the ancients, which has to be considered as itself contributing to

constrain actions and shape events [60]. The neo-classical, even the


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Tacitist, historian writes in a world where the classical paradigm is only

partly applicable.

31. All these historical changes, or rather all these shapings of historicalcontexts unknown to the classical paradigm, were accompanied by

recent technological or social innovations, such as gunpowder,

typography, navigation, commerce, fiscality, the standing army, civil

religion; medieval innovations, such as feudalism, scholasticism,

barbarian language and laws; late antique innovations, such as Roman

law, the theology and the authority structure of the Christian church.

These, and any other discoveries and inventions which might impose

themselves on the early modern and early Enlightened mind, could be

brought together under such general rubrics as 'manners' or 'civil

society', and employed as contexts within which histories according to

the classical paradigm continued to be written.

32. David Hume's History of Englandwas divided into reigns, each

narrated in language closely following that of the chroniclers of the time;

yet this language was as far as possible rendered modern and polite, the

accompanying 'philosophical' commentary at times took over the

structure of narration, and at the end of each reign a chapter wasinserted reviewing the king's character, the significant legislation enacted

by or under him, the general state of society and the progress (if any) of

the liberal and occasionally the useful arts during his reign. The history of

social and cultural conditions (as we should term it) was still regularly, but

not always, made to subserve the narrative of res gestaein the role of

contexts; but there was developing a new kind of sequentially-written

history, whose function was to narrate the transition from one historical

context, or one generalised state of society, to another. Hume andGibbon, major historians, continued to write the two kinds of narrative

concurrently, and faced the problem of linking them more revealingly

than by such convenient copulaeas About this time [...], or During his

reign the state of society [...]. There were other major historians who


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offered subversively like Voltaire in the Essai sur les Moeur more

conservatively like Robertson in the View of the Progress of Human

Society... or Ferguson in the Essay on the History of Civil Society

writings which were essentially, or exclusively, narratives of the processesof social or contextual change. These authors could be termed

'historians', yet there was an unextinguished doubt whether their works

were properly to be termed 'histories'; perhaps they were essays,

discourses, treatises on 'origins' or 'progress', and the word 'history'

should be reserved for works in which the narrative of exemplary deeds

remained autonomous if not preponderant. We may even find cardinal

and crucial contributions to historical literature in works like

Montesquieu's De l'Esprit des Loisor Adam Smith's Lectures on

Jurisprudence

POCOCK[1]. the Transformation of Humanism

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