Barbarism and Religion

by J. G. A. Pocock

• ISBN13: 9780521760720
• ISBN10: 0521760720
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2011-02-14
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

This fifth volume in John Pocock's acclaimed sequence on Barbarism and Religion turns to the controversy caused by Edward Gibbon's treatment of the early Christian church. Examining this controversy in unprecedented depth, Pocock challenges the assumption that Gibbon wrote with the intention of destroying belief in the Christian revelation, and questions our understanding of the character of 'enlightenment'. Reconsidering the genesis, inception and reception of these crucial chapters of Decline and Fall, Pocock explores the response of Gibbon's critics, affirming that his reputation as an unbeliever was established before his history of the Church had been written. The magnitude of Barbarism and Religion is already apparent. Religion: The First Triumph will be read not just as a remarkable analysis of the making of Decline and Fall, but also as a comment on the collision of belief and disbelief, a subject as pertinent now as it was to Gibbon's eighteenth-century readers.

Table of Contents

Preface	p. ix
Acknowledgements	p. xv
Advice to readers	p. xviii
List of abbreviations	p. xix
Introduction	p. 1
Gibbon's Orthodox Sources
The Christian ancients: Eusebius and the Fathers	p. 21
The Catholic moderns: history and authority	p. 46
The Sources of Protestant Enlightenment
Jean Le Clerc and the history of language	p. 89
The Historia Ecclesiastica and the later works of Le Clerc	p. 115
Isaac de Beausobre: heresy, philosophy, history	p. 137
Johann Lorenz von Mosheim: modern ecclesiastical historian	p. 163
The Two Chapters Explored
The English setting	p. 215
Gibbon's fifteenth chapter: the spread of Christianity and the rise of the clergy	p. 244
The sixteenth chapter: intolerance, persecution and philosophy	p. 289
Controversy and Continuation
The reception of the two chapters and the invention of the author	p. 313
Epilogue and prologue	p. 372
Envoi	p. 385
Bibliography	p. 387
Index	p. 401
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