From the notorious New Republic, yet worth a read. I have been troubled for decades about the inconsistency in Gibbon’s declaring Christianity as a cause of the Fall of Rome despite the persistence of a thoroughly Christian Byzantine Empire.
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Interesting critique. Not sure who’s got the better argument about the role of Christianity in Rome’s fall, but I agree more with Gibbon on the effect of “manly virtues falling to effeminate vices” playing a part, and the same is true today.
Only today it’s more like “manly virtues being clubbed to death by neo-Marxist psychological warfare disguised as Feminism”, or something.
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Thank you, Cogito, for bringing Mike Duncan’s essay to our attention. I agree that it’s worth reading.
I am, however, critical of the essay. True to the view from the Left now in the early 2020s, and believing that “We simply have more information, better sources, and superior analytic skills”, Mike Duncan scorns Gibbon’s “bigotries” while not realizing that he is displaying his own. Yes, Gibbon despised the backward peoples of his day, and that goes against the political correctness of Duncan’s day in which scorn for “other cultures” is not allowed. He also, true to his conforming principles, blames Gibbon for “misogynistic undertones”.
He does concede that “If we are lucky, future historians will consider what we write today just as blinkered, inaccurate, and misguided as we consider Gibbon.” Which means, as he considers Gibbon.
He admires Gibbon’s style while denigrating his opinion.
Would I be wrong to say that Mike Duncan is patronizing Gibbon?
No historian can ever be unquestionably right. And no writer can ever be unaffected by his time. But Gibbon brings mountains of evidence to support his contentions, and much of it remains convincing. His main contention is that Christianity was a chief cause of the fall of the western Roman Empire. And I think he is right about that.
If Christianity was not the cause, what was?
If Christianity did not bring darkness down on western Europe for a thousand years, what did? Or were there no Dark Ages?
Yes, south eastern Europe and parts of Asia and Africa continued to be ruled by Christian Byzantium for centuries after Rome lost its western empire. The Byzantine Empire expanded and shrank – to an area no greater than Constantinople itself by the start of the 15th. century - but it persisted until it fell to Muslim invaders in 1453. What sustained it for all those centuries? Was it Christianity? If so, how and why? Was it that it was steeped in Greek culture? Was it something else? If so, what? That remains the question.
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That is the question, indeed. I think the fashion today is that one doesn’t speak about Rome falling, but one should speak of Late Antiquity, which was a period of two or three centuries of transition from pagan Rome to Christian Europe. I claim no expertise in this matter. Until proven otherwise by a better mind than Duncan, I’ll stick with the incomparable Gibbon.
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Yes, great point that Duncan “scorns Gibbons ‘bigotries’ while not realizing that he is displaying his own”. The fact that Gibbon wasn’t constrained by “political correctness” in his thinking, like Duncan is, makes me more inclined to trust his opinion than Duncan’s.
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