Gibbon and History

Gibbon was not only the heir of the antiquaries and of the great fathers of classical scholarship to whose works he had been constantly drawn since a boy, but also of les philosophes, particularly of Bayle, whom he venerated, and of Montesquieu and Voltaire. Their attitude to the past was novel. Bayle and Voltaire, at least, took a sceptical, often malicious, view of the Christian past and all of its works. Voltaire jeered frequently enough at the mole-like activities of les érudits and mocked their beliefs. Nevertheless, the philosophers were deeply concerned to understand the past in all of its variety and seeming contradiction, searching for laws which would be both rational and convincing. Their interest in historical evidence was largely superficial; it was needed, of course, to underpin an argument or to illustrate a theme, but was not in itself a necessary pursuit in the search for historical truth. Nevertheless, their role in the development of historical studies was profound and, for Western society, deeply original. They were attempting to reconstruct the past in non-Christian terms and they were trying, for the first time, to explain the destiny of man by his own nature (1). At the same time, their purpose was educative, but in the broad, not the precise, sense. The main aim was the understanding, not a mere realizing, of man and his past. Gibbon combined within himself both attitudes. He valued knowledge for its own sake, yet he was aware that erudition could not be an end in itself. History needed to be philosophic and purposeful. But the history of what?

Gibbon’s indecision, recorded in his Journal, about the subject of his life’s work is fascinating and illustrates the basic theme of this chapter to perfection. He considered for some time a variety of subjects, from a life of Sir Walter Raleigh, a history of the Third Crusade and the foundations of the Swiss Republic. They stirred his imagination, but wisely he dropped them. Raleigh was too parochial, the Swiss demanded a knowledge of German language and literature that he was not prepared to undertake (2). But all these excuses were rationalizations. They posed great historical problems - the Swiss a major one - as did the history of the Medicis with its conflict of cultures, which he considered for a while. He was, however, drawn inevitably to the great problem of European history and the duality of its past. Indeed, his life had largely been a preparation for this work, long before he made his famous journey to Rome. Yet it was in Rome that Gibbon found the image that is a key not only to his own work, but also to the development of historical studies in Europe. He writes in his Autobiography:

It was at Rome, on the 15th of October, 1764, as I sat musing amidst the ruins of the Capitol, while the bare-footed friars were singing vespers in the Temple of Jupiter, that the idea of writing the decline and fall of the city first started to my mind.

 

Here, in succinct symbolism - the bare-footed friars, the Temple of Jupiter - Gibbon placed in juxtaposition the two great cultures that Western Europe had experienced, the question that had haunted scholars of two centuries or more, the condition that had produced the inner dynamic of so many historical studies of which Gibbon was the heir. He never forgot his debt to the scholars, to the masters of historical criticism and method who made his work possible. What Gibbon did, however, was to absorb their work and make it a part of historical literature for all time. After Gibbon, history was fully fledged. The success of his book brought, as did the works of other historians of the Enlightenment, a new depth to the understanding of European history amongst the educated elite. As with Voltaire or Hume, Gibbon interpreted history in purely human terms. Of course, he made moral judgments and he stressed the effects of chance. But his moral judgments were those of men, not God, and his chance was purely human, not a great external force, not Fortuna playing grimly with the lives of men. History had to be understood in human terms, be motivated by human forces; follies and iniquities abounded, but they were neither the result of ignoring the gods nor of original sin. Gibbon raised the writing of history to a new level. He was aware, more acutely than any of his predecessors, both of its possibilities and its limitations. He sought a detached and truthful past, free from preconception or the idea of inherent purpose. Yet his detachment was infused with a warm and generous attitude to mankind in spite of its immeasurable follies and iniquities. Gibbon frequently spoke of the candour of history, because it could display, not truths about the universe, or immutable laws of social development, but merely the truth of ourselves as living human beings (4). History contained causes and events, not laws or systems. And yet Gibbon did not believe he was writing merely to entertain. History possessed a purpose and this was to deepen experience, to make men wiser about themselves and, also, about the social processes in which they were necessarily involved. After all, he wanted to explain the greatest cataclysm of European history.

But Gibbon stood in lonely detachment; most of the philosophic historians of the Enlightenment wished to wring more than he did from their study of history, to find immutable laws of historical change and development. They discovered their overall design in Progress, about which they grew both rhapsodic and optimistic. Gibbon shared little of their enthusiasm. He did, however, give a highly qualified assent to their general proposition that the condition of mankind had improved. To this we will return later.

Gibbon had demonstrated that historians could rewrite the history of antiquity with a wealth of detail and knowledge that surpassed classical historians. Herodotus, Thucydides, Livy, Tacitus and the rest were no longer the occupants of Olympian heights, unattainable by moderns. And scholars turned to the history of Greece and Rome with a new vigour. But the historical ferment went deeper. Through the discoveries of archaeology, Time itself was given a vast extension towards the close of the eighteenth century. The decipherment of the Rosetta stone, the quickening pace of discovery in Assyria and Babylonia, the deepening knowledge of India and China brought a new sense of diversity of man’s past and enlarged the problems of history. Nor did erudition wane, indeed it waxed. New archives, particularly medieval archives, became available in the early nineteenth century. The spread of critical methods initiated by the great Maurist and Bollandist scholars in the seventeenth century, and developed by the German historians in the eighteenth, to the great nationalist sources of history in Germany, in France and in England made history not only a widespread profession but also a highly technical craft (5). Against this huge deluge of material, historians struggled manfully. Leopold von Ranke still hoped to write a Universal History; indeed, he settled down to write it at the age of eighty-six. He wrote in the 1860’s that:

In my opinion, we must work in two directions: the investigation of the effective factors in historical events and the understanding of their universal relationship ...

 

The investigation of a single detail already requires profound and very penetrating study. At the present time, however, we are all agreed that the critical method, objective research, and synthetic construction can and must go together. Historical research will not suffer for its connection with the universal: without this link, research would become enfeebled, and without exact research the conception would degenerate into a phantasm (6).

Ranke’s intention is still Gibbon’s to combine the most exact erudition with philosophic history.

The professional historian, as the nineteenth century progressed, was forced into narrower and narrower fields of study, and often his studies were still the servants of an overall concept of the past. Indeed, there is no outstanding historian of the nineteenth century who did not accept a large structural interpretation of the destiny of man, and usually of his nation too. The task, however, grew ever more difficult. And the twentieth century brought a change. Time and time again large-scale and small-scale assumptions about the purpose or meaning of history were sharply attacked. Professional historians began increasingly to reduce their generalizations to the professional areas of their interest. Did the Norman Conquest introduce feudalism into England? Was slavery a cause of the American Civil War? Did the philosophes help to provoke the French Revolution? Specialization confined itself to professional and not philosophic concepts. As in the seventeenth century, erudition dominated historical studies; the pursuit of scholarship became more important than the interpretation of history. Periodically, the professional historian lifted his head and tried to make up his mind what could or could not be derived from historical study. His answers expressed doubt, uncertainty, perhaps even bewilderment, and many thought it better not to embark on generalizations as perilous and as disputatious as these. After all, the debris of the past, shovelled wholesale into thousands of libraries and national and local record offices, provided material for work for tens of thousands of professional historians who were content to reduce it into some kind of order in fields of ever increasing specialization. Ten years of the history of Seattle or Sienna could provide a lifetime’s work and a lifetime’s academic career. And, on occasion, rightly so; for such studies in the hands of a professional historian of ability can help to solve technical and scholarly problems of great importance.

Hence, history tended to become in the twentieth century, for the majority of its practitioners, a study for professionals by professionals. The purpose of history was limited; it trained the mind in criticism and in judgment, satisfied curiosity and made the wise wiser. What they would not allow was the old philosophic attitude of the Enlightenment, that history should interpret the destiny of mankind. This attitude of limited objectives and intentions has been common to those historians who have attempted, during the last sixty years, to keep history as a part of general culture, as well as of highly professional scholars who are concerned with the rigours of historical method. And, indeed, even today this is as far as the majority of historical writers and historical scholars would go in giving meaning and purpose to history. The business of the historian is to make sense of the past(7). That is his primary task, but it is far from simple, for the complexities of historical forces are very intricate and their elucidation never easy. Hence it is natural for the professional historian to limit his field and concentrate his powers. He is likely to achieve greater mastery and deeper understanding, even though his vision in the terms of the history of mankind may be very limited.

This is, of course, a highly defensible attitude. Limited it may be, but it is sound, sensible and cautious. It has commanded respect over the last two centuries. The professional purpose is to understand, neither more nor less. This attitude can be traced back to the Enlightenment, to Herder who, concerned as he was with moral judgment in history, nevertheless realized that empathy was essential to the historian’s task. Empathy, imagination, the attempt to place oneself in an historic situation and into an historic character without pre-judgment, rose in public favour throughout the nineteenth century. Indeed, Marc Bloch in the twentieth called ‘understanding’ the beacon light of our studies (8). However, this restricted view still leaves unanswered the deeper question the understanding of what? A human character, an event in time, the nature of an institution, of the reasons for belief? The progression rises. Dare it lift to the process of history itself? It would seem not. Bloch, unlike Ranke, could not contemplate a universal history. By his day, history itself had rendered this impossible. Or rather, not impossible, but intellectually useless. To the trained historian, erudition by its very bulk had obliterated the possibility of that universal synthesis so much desired by Ranke. The historian’s business may be to make sense of the past, but only of his own patch and not the vast panorama that stretches back to the beginning of time.

And so we come to the heart of the paradox. History began because scholars perceived a problem which faced no other civilization: the problem of the duality of Europe’s past, its conflicting ideologies and of their different interpretations of human destiny. Once historical criticism developed, the Christian explanation of the past could not maintain its supremacy. It slowly collapsed under criticism, but just as slowly and just as surely did the interpretations which replaced it the concept of progress, the manifest destinies of competitive nationalism, social Darwinism, or dialectical materialism. History, which is so deeply concerned with the past, has, in a sense, helped to destroy it as a social force, as a synthesizing and comprehensive statement of human destiny.

Because of this, most historians in this century have avoided any attempt to explain the history of man. This has been left to the journalists, the prophets or the philosophers, but some of those who have attempted it acquired great popular success. H. G. Wells, Oswald Spengler and Arnold Toynbee, who sought to mould history into a meaningful past, secured millions of readers but the almost universal condemnation of historians. Yet the reception of their books points to the need of ordinary people, as well as to the difficulty of fulfilling it (9). Although the past manufactured by his ancestors will no longer do, it would seem that men in the West still seek a meaningful past, one which will confer as much significance on their lives as the Marxist past does for those who can believe in it. Can historians fulfil this need? And is it their rightful task?

The historian, I believe, has a twofold purpose. He must pursue and test the concepts with which he deals. And because of the amount of material and its complexity, these concepts are likely to be limited in time. Much of his life must be spent, therefore, working with, and writing for, fellow professionals. These, as yet, are very early days for exact, professional history. But this cannot be the historian’s sole raison d’être. Some would argue that the training which experience, even a short experience, gives in the techniques of historical study is a sufficient argument for its existence. This is the old argument for classical studies in a new guise. It is, of course, true that historical study does exercise memory, capacity for argument and clarity of expression. And it is excellent that it should do so, but there are plenty of academic disciplines which can do this, perhaps better than history (10). The study of history can, of course, and does extend human experience in a peculiarly vivid way, but so do literary studies, so should sociology or anthropology or the study of politics (11). Again, this is in no way peculiar to history. The combination of all these virtues would justify a minor academic discipline and fulfil a minor social role in satisfying curiosity and gratifying nostalgia. History as entertainment, whether of the intellectual or of the romantic housewife, would persist. If this, however, were all that a study of history could do, no one would insist that it fulfils a vital and major social role. Yet if the past is allowed to die, or, having died, a new one fails to be conceived, that will be the fate of history. Its place as the interpreter of man’s destiny will be taken by the social sciences.

In many ways the historian of today is in the position of the historian of the Enlightenment. He cannot accept the interpretation of the past of his immediate ancestors or even of the mass of society in which he lives. Crude ideological interpretations, Marxist or nationalist, conservative or liberal, religious or agnostic, providential or progressive, cyclical or linear, are a violation of his discipline and an offence to his knowledge. Many historians, therefore, have taken refuge in the meaninglessness of history, in the belief that history can only make a personal or neutral statement; it is a game for professional players who make the rules. Others, more conservative, have taken refuge in its providential nature. The Christian myth dies hard. We need again a compulsive sense of the value of man’s past, not only for ourselves as historians, but also for the world at large.

The historians of the Enlightenment could discover with delirious joy the antique past that beckoned them in Greece and Rome; the multiplicity of historical worlds that rose above their intellectual horizon-—Egypt, Persia, India, China gave them new stimulus, fresh ideas, and a deep sense of recovery, of escape into a fresher, more viable historical understanding. Alas, such an experience cannot revitalize the historian of this century (12). There are no new pasts to discover. They are all exposed and all peopled by professional experts, digging in their minute concessions in the hope of finding a new sherd. The very limitations of professional historical study make it difficult for historians to deal with any message that might be derived from the vista of man’s past, even if he believed in them. He does not look for them. He does not wish to lift his eyes from what he can see with clarity to what may be baffling, obscure and misleading. Philosophical history is at a discount, and antiquarianism, transmuted into scholarship, triumphs. After two world wars, after Hitler and Hiroshima, after the brutalities of Stalin and the sad failures in Africa, in India, in Indonesia, historians cannot help but look at the immediate, as well as the distant, past with foreboding and with pessimism. But blind optimism has rarely been the fault of the perceptive historian; Voltaire and Gibbon, the greatest historians of the Enlightenment, were conscious enough of the follies, the iniquities, the stupidities of mankind. But they were sufficiently detached to qualify their pessimism and to use a balanced judgment. To them the gains made by mankind were obvious and remarkable. They still are. Any historian who is not blindly prejudiced cannot but admit that the ordinary man and woman, unless they should be caught up in a murderous field of war, are capable of securing a richer life than their ancestors. There is more food in the world, more opportunity of advancement, greater areas of liberty in ideas and in living than the world has ever known: art, music, literature can be enjoyed by tens of millions, not tens of thousands. This has been achieved by not clinging to conservative tradition or by relying on instinct or emotion, but by the application of human ingenuity, no matter what the underlying motive might be. The great extension of rationalism has been a cause and a consequence of this development. In field after field, rationalism has proved its worth. It still has vast areas left to conquer in politics and social organization which may prove beyond its capacity, owing to the aggressive instincts built so deeply into man’s nature. Nevertheless, the historian must stress the success, as well as point out the failure. Here is a message of the past which is as clear, but far more true than the message wrung from it by our ancestors. The past can be used to sanctify not authority nor morality but those qualities of the human mind which have raised us from the forest and swamp to the city, build to a qualified confidence in man’s capacity to order his life and to stress the virtues of intellect, of rational behaviour. And this past is neither pagan nor Christian, it belongs to no nation and no class, it is universal; it is human in the widest sense of that term. But this past must not be too simple. Just as the Christian past stressed the complexity of the battle between good and evil, so should the historian’s past dwell on the difficulties which have faced those who have fought for intellectual and moral enlightenment. Nor need we gloss their motives. The historian’s duty is to reveal the complexities of human behaviour and the strangeness of events. The past which mankind needs no longer is a simple one. Experience as well as science has made the majority of literate men aware of the vast complexity of human existence, its subtle interrelations. What, however, is becoming less and less stressed is the nature of the past, not only its successes, but also the shadows it casts across our lives. History, the dimension of Time, is ignored too frequently by sociologists, economists, politicians and philosophers; even theologians wish to escape from its clutches.

(An extract from The Death of the Past by J. H, Plumb)