One of the epigrams for Richard Cohen’s book Making History is Hilary Mantel’s observation that “[b]eneath every history, there is another history—there is, at least, the life of the historian.” There is much in Robertson’s chapter, “Philosophical History,” from his book The Enlightenment, that bears out that statement.
Robertson opens his chapter with the observation that “[u]ntil the eighteenth century, the principles underlying history were usually thought by Christians to be sacred. . . . History was first and foremost the history of the church . . . “.
Voltaire and other Enlighteners proceeded to turn sacred history on its head. Voltaire’s Essai sur les mœurs et l’esprit des nations (first published in 1756) “provided a model for the great sweeping histories that are characteristic of the Enlightenment. . . . Voltaire “thought that Newtonian physics might provide a model for history, at least in the sense that ancient models would be superseded. Historians should dismiss legends, found in ancient medieval chronicles, about prodigies, rains of blood, or Bishop Hatton of Mainz being devoured by rats in the year 698. They should instead adopt the inductive methods of the sciences and base their work on the careful collection of empirical data.” [p. 557]
“But,” Robertson then asks, “how reliable was the knowledge thus acquired?” Voltaire thought “[a]ncient history . . . was deeply unreliable. It offered a few truths surrounded by a thousand falsehoods.” [p. 558] Yet what was to say the Enlightenment approach would fare any better?
Jean-Baptiste le Rond d’Alembert understood that even the natural sciences “could at best attain a very high degree of probability.” Locke, among others carrying the thought forward, determined that “[t]he historian, unable to perform experiments, had to weigh up the intrinsic likelihood or otherwise of an event, and the trustworthiness of witnesses.” [p. 558] In this way, “[m]ethods of source criticism were developed alongside new technical skills that historians nowadays take for granted.” [p. 559]
And what about the fraught business of interpretation? “A long tradition regarded history as offering exempla of good or bad conduct, to be imitated or shunned . . . “ [p. 559] D’Alembert, however, determined that “history was instructive, but not in giving us particular examples to follow. . . . History did yield general truths, but they were located at a deeper level than that of mere exemplarity. It was necessary to get below specifics and arrive at the underlying general principles.” [p. 559]
While observing that “[t]he search for general principles . . . presupposed the existence of a constant and uniform human nature,” Robertson cautions that this is “an idea that has been much criticized and misunderstood. It may be thought a mask for conservatism . . . “. Offering Hume as one example, Robertson posits that he “and his fellows are not saying that all humans resemble, or should resemble, white male eighteenth-century literati. They are sharply conscious of the variety in human customs and cultures.” [p. 560] Instead, the Enlighteners thought “all these variations are outgrowths of the same basic humanity. They can be explained from the basic principles of human nature, modified by local circumstances. . . . . If one denies this, one would seem to be claiming that some human customs and cultures are unintelligible, or somehow not human.” [p. 560]
“History now ceased to be simply narrative or anecdotal. It analysed events as well as recounting them.” [p. 560] Indeed, “Voltaire said that mere events taught him nothing.” [p. 561] “Now, historians addressed ‘the progress of society’. They had to consider whether society really had progressed since ancient times, and for this they had to take a stand in the ‘Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes’.” [p. 561] Robertson traces one aspect of the quarrel, on population growth, which Hume settled “in favor of the moderns . . . Between the lines of Hume’s essay it emerges that the ancient world was not only less populous than the modern, but also much more unpleasant to live in.” [p. 561]
Robertson next examines the “two outstanding centres of historical research: Göttingen and Edinburgh.” A major Enlightenment figure in Göttingen was August Ludwig Schlözer. Schlözer “dreamed of nothing less than writing ‘universal history’, the history of the world, but never got beyond publishing a manifesto . . .”. [p. 563] In Johann Gottfried Herder’s view, Schlözer’s chief problem was that “he lacked a guiding idea.” [p. 564] Friedrich Schiller fared better. His big idea was freedom and, in particular, “resistance to tyranny,” which he examined, for one, through the lens of the Thirty Year War. [p. 564]
Scottish historians had their own version of the big idea, “the ‘four stages theory’. According to this view, society advanced through successive stages, each defined by the dominant mode of subsistence.” [p. 565] These were the ages of hunters, shepherds, agriculture, and commerce. In terms of method, for the earliest stages, “[t]o reconstruct societies that had left no written record, historians had to rely on informed conjecture.” [p. 567] In contrast, ‘’[f]or the transition to modern commercial society, the historian at last has a large array of documents and can reconstruct a complex process.” [p. 570] Commerce was seen as the most advanced stage, “held together not by force, nor by personal loyalty or affection, but by enlightened self-interest.” [p. 571]
The question remained whether “‘the progress of society’ brought us close to perfection.” In Robertson’s view, “[o]ur historians are too cautious to think so. They see dangers in the very freedom that commerce has brought about.” [p. 571] Robertson concludes that “[t]he sociologically minded historians were aiming at a narrative analysis of social development that would treat its early stages without condescension and its latest stage without naïve overconfidence.” [p. 572]
Robertson then turns to more in-depth examination of three historians: David Hume, Catharine Macaulay, and Edward Gibbon. Of Hume’s and Macaulay’s histories of England, he observes that Hume’s, “though little read nowadays, is among the masterpieces of the Enlightenment.” [p. 572] Macaulay’s “is read even less today. Yet she was the first female English historian.” [p. 573] Her 8-volume history “brought her profit and fame . . . . [even though] [h]er radical political views were notorious, and sometimes ridiculed.” [p. 573] One of her radical positions was “support for the American Revolution,” which earned her “ten days staying with George and Martha Washington at Mount Vernon.” [p. 573] In their work, “Hume relied chiefly on printed sources [while] Macaulay also made extensive use of state papers, seventeenth-century pamphlets and manuscripts. . . . So, by present-day standards, one could call her the more professional historian.” [p. 581]
When reading history from secondary sources, particularly when the period is one on which reams have been written, I can feel, at points, that I’ve been dropped into the middle of an unending debate. Robertson’s commentary on Hume and Macaulay was one such instance; his subchapter on Gibbon another, larger one. As I’ve read none of the primary texts involved, I’m dependent on Robertson to be fair-minded and accurate, though of course within his own point of view. (My verdict so far, until proven otherwise, is that I am in good hands.)
So, on to Gibbon. Richard Cohen credits particularly Gibbon and Voltaire for changing “the way history was written . . . by freeing it (for a while, at least) from mythmaking and the prism of Church doctrines, casting off the shackles that hindered earlier historians.” [Making History, p. 195] They tackled this, however, in different ways. Jorge Luis Borges observed:
“They share the same disdain for human religions or superstitions, but their literary conduct differs greatly. Voltaire employed his extraordinary style to show or suggest that the facts of history are contemptible; Gibbon has no better opinion of humanity, but man’s actions attract him as a spectacle, and he uses that attraction to entertain and fascinate the reader.” [MH, p. 195]
Cohen is not beneath a bit of spectacle himself. Here he is, on Gibbon:
“ . . . Anne-Louise Germaine . . . on one of Gibbon’s visits to their home suggested that she and Gibbon marry; she was eleven at the time. We now know her as Madame de Staël . . . Napoleon’s archenemy. Imagine had Gibbon waited a few years and then taken her up on her offer! . . . . It seems amazing that he should have found female companions at all. For Gibbon was formidably ugly.” [MH, p. 213] As described by Virginia Woolf, “The body in Gibbon’s case was ridiculous—prodigiously fat, enormously top-heavy, precariously balanced upon little feet upon which he spun around with astonishing alacrity.” [MH, p. 214]
Gibbon’s book, however, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, was a big hit. “Gibbon’s publisher boasted that [volume 1 of] the book ‘sold like a threepenny pamphlet on current affairs.’ . . . . Later generations were just as admiring. Gladstone . . . reckoned Gibbon to be one of the three greatest historians of all time.” [MH, p. 219] Winston Churchill wrote, “I devoured Gibbon. I rode triumphantly through it from end to end and enjoyed it all.” [MH, p. 220]
So what of the book itself? Robertson writes that “[t]he Decline was intended to combine narrative with analysis in a manner that Gibbon thought best exemplified by the ‘philosophic historian’ Tacitus.” [p. 582] And from Montesquieu, Gibbon took on “the distinction between ‘general causes’ and facts. Facts could yield much hidden meaning to a philosophic historian, who would interpret them in the light of ‘general causes.’ . . . . This has been called a ‘stratified’ conception of history-writing. It requires the superficial stratum of facts to be interpreted through customs, social practices, beliefs, [and] ways of thinking . . .”. [p. 584]
Early on in the book, “Gibbon’s description is already philosophical in hinting at the causes of its decline.” [p. 584] He “indicates two sources of the ‘slow and secret poison’ that would, centuries later, bring down the Empire. First, Augustus had abolished the political freedom of the Roman Republic. . . . Second, Gibbon captures the ambivalence of ‘luxury’. . .”. [p. 585] Along with its attributes, including making possible “high civilization, polite manners, learning and the arts . . . . its effects were also ‘enervating’.” [p. 585]
Gibbon cites, for example, that “[s]oldiers enervated by luxury’ [were] unwilling to wear heavy armour or carry burdensome weapons.” [p. 585] Robertson observes that “[a] cyclical pattern becomes visible, in which a military nation achieves conquests through its solidarity and discipline, enjoys the resulting wealth, but then succumbs to its own prosperity, grows soft, employs mercenaries to do its fighting, and is finally overcome by those very mercenaries.” [pp. 585-6]
Robertson notes that “Gibbon is said to have contributed to the Enlightenment’s grand narrative by applying historical research to understand ‘the triumph of barbarism and religion’, that is, the obstacles which were overcome in the rise of commercial society. . . . Gibbon . . . took this grand narrative for granted.” [p. 587] However, “it is not the story he is telling in the Decline.” [p. 587]
Gibbon offers several analytical chapters outlining “general causes that underlie the facts he narrates . . . . Above all, we have what the reader may by now feel is the elephant in the room—a famous or notorious (at any rate immensely searching) study of Christianity, the theological controversies that tormented the Christian world, and the effect of Christianity on the decline of the Empire.” [p. 588]
And this, dear readers, is one of those moments where I feel I have parachuted down into the middle of an ongoing debate. About a year ago, I entertained the Quixotic idea of reading Gibbon’s book. When I realized it was several volumes long, I thought perhaps I should first find out whether his theses were obsolete. There were a multitude of books and a cacophony of points of view on the topic. I went through a few and ended up reading Mary Beard’s. She wrote of Gibbon:
” . . . the history of ancient Rome has changed dramatically over the past fifty years, and even more so over the almost 250 years since Edward Gibbon wrote The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, his idiosyncratic historical experiment that began the modern study of Roman history in the English-speaking world. That is partly because of the new ways of looking at the old evidence, and the different questions we choose to put to it. It is a dangerous myth that we are better historians than our predecessors. We are not. But we come to Roman history with different priorities . . . that make the ancient past speak to us in a new idiom.” [SPQR, p.17]
Robertson’s commentary on Gibbon makes reading the Decline tempting—if only there were world enough and time. For the present, I will content myself with Robertson’s views on what Gibbon was about. With regard to the “elephant in the room” to which Robertson refers, Gibbon “does not mock Christianity in the manner of Voltaire (whom he later calls ‘an intolerant bigot’). . . . Gibbon’s text . . . describes the core of Christianity as ‘a genuine revelation fitted to inspire the most rational esteem and conviction’. Humanity, however, has an innate propensity to superstition. The ‘multitude’, incapable of philosophy, wants tangible images of the divine. So, when polytheism disappeared, Christians found a substitute in the cult of saints and images . . .”. [p. 589]
Robertson continues, “the valuable core of Christianity has been overlaid with . . . a huge superstructure of false historical claims, absurd cultic practices, and unintelligible theological controversy—all supported by officially sanctioned hatred and frequent persecution . . .”. [p. 589] Gibbon spent several chapters on aspects of this, including, for example, “the Paulician heresy . . . with attention also to the bitterly controversial question of whether the Holy Ghost proceeded from the Father and the Son, or from the Father by the Son . . .”. [p. 589]
Lest we think that only a tiny number of theologians concerned themselves with such controversies, Robertson advises that these “were not rarefied debates among intellectuals. In Constantinople, the mass of people argued about the difference between homoousion (the Son being of the same substance with the Father) and homoiousion (the Son being of only similar substance to the Father).” [p. 589] Gibbon was aware, however, “that the early Christians inhabited a mental world that even professing Christians of his own time would find deeply alien.” [p. 591] In this, “Gibbon is more able than Hume to imagine a time when people thought and felt differently.” [p. 591]
Robertson sees “[t]he Decline [as] an innovative achievement in history-writing, and a literary masterpiece. Gibbon combines philosophic history with the critical analysis of sources pioneered by the érudits of the Republic of Letters. . . . The great difference between Gibbon and modern historians of Rome is, naturally, that they draw on extensive and ever-increasing archaeological findings which were not available to him.” [p. 592]
In terms of the story Gibbon is telling, for some “it points forward in a celebratory manner to modern Europe . . .” [p. 592] “But this conclusion is not born out . . . for [Gibbon] has shown that Christianity damaged civilization by demonizing the classics, by preferring saints’ legends to the writings of Plato and Cicero, and by distracting people from their civic duties. We can only too easily imagine the rise of another fundamentalism that would preserve our material culture but would destroy our cultural heritage.” [p. 593]
Toward the close of his discussion of Gibbon and the Decline, Robertson notes: “Contrary to the widespread view of Gibbon, taken in recent decades . . . . he offers no guarantee that modern commercial society will not fall victim to the cycle of growth, luxury and corruption that, on his showing, has afflicted so many others. Indeed, his narrative of the decline of the empire founded by Augustus forms a gigantic memento mori, warning his own time, which was often celebrated as a new Augustan age, that civilizations as well as people are mortal.” [p. 593]
Robertson next asks whether, as a general matter, “the moral stature of human beings [had] kept pace with material progress.” [p. 595] Some, but only some, Enlightenment thinkers “proclaimed their conviction that progress, or the march of the human spirit, was underwritten by nature and/or Providence.” [p. 595] Turgot, for one, believed “[w]ar and destruction were necessary” and that “’alternating between agitation and calm, of good and ill, the human race as a whole has advanced unceasingly towards perfection.’” [p. 595]
Yet, as Robertson notes, “[h]istory shows a great deal of war and destruction that does not conduce towards progress in any visible way.” [p. 595] Robertson also has little time for Nicolas de Condorcet’s vision, in which “[r]eason will bring about a utopia where the will of the majority determines the truth . . .”. [p. 596] Not so fast, saith Robertson: “It must be clear that this is a utopian projection, anticipating a future in which everyone will have become completely rational.” [p. 596]
Immanuel Kant took a different approach. “Human beings, insofar as they possess reason, cannot develop their reason fully within the short span of an individual life. Reason is destined to be fully developed not in the life of any individual, but in the history of the species.” [p. 599] Humans “have two opposed impulses: towards community and towards conflict.” [p. 599] So, as Kant saw it, “[t]he problem . . . is to work out a form of civil society, and an international order, which contains this productive conflict without damaging effects.” [p. 599] Kant’s own utopian vision, or at least I would name it so, is that “after many revolutions, with all their transforming effects, the highest purpose of nature, a universal cosmopolitan existence, will at last be realized as the matrix within which all the original capacities of the human race may develop.” [p. 599]
At the end of the chapter, I penciled in a bit of marginalia: “Kant has been proved wrong again and again on this, but perhaps it is the right hope.” Or, perhaps, it is the only hope.
To accompany you on your journey through this post, should you choose to take it, here is Arturo Toscanini conducting the NBC Orchestra in Ottorino Respighi’s The Pines of Rome:
Prufrock's Dilemma 