THE POLITICS OF DEBATE IN THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND

We have now deduced – as Gibbon himself might say – a regular series of ecclesiastical historians from Eusebius to Mosheim. It is not a complete history of that discipline, supposing one to be possible; the recognised ‘ecclesiastical historians’ of Christian antiquity – Sulpicius Severus, Sozomen, Socrates Ecclesiasticus – have not appeared and do not play a crucial role in chapters 15 and 16 of the Decline and Fall. After Tillemont Barbarism and Religion deserts Catholic for Protestant scholarship, and its leading figures are present because Gibbon chose to emphasise them in ways that indicate the use he made of them. They provide a context in which the two chapters may usefully be read – though it will appear that Gibbon's partial desertion of that context is an important key to the character of those chapters – and they display ecclesiastical history in the setting provided by Protestant Europe between 1680 and 1776. In that period Christian culture generated within itself many of the debates and problems we bring together in formulating the concept of ‘Enlightenment’, and historians in the twenty-first century discuss this process in debating the unity or plurality of that set of phenomena. We have seen Gibbon employing such words as lumière and éclairé with special reference to the critical methods developed (but not invented) by Jean Le Clerc, and one strand of ‘Enlightenment’ may be defined as the complex interactions between criticism and faith.