pocock[1]. the transformation of humanism
TRANSCRIPT
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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