Abstract
The history of Christianity affords ample opportunities for reflection on the nature of religious persecution. Christians endured it from the Roman state, fellow Christians, Jews, and pagan adversaries. In turn, Christians inflected it upon pagans, Jews, and heretics. Certainly, as moralists and as critics of Christianity, Hume and Gibbon occupied themselves with the phenomenon of religious persecution, particularly when Christians were the agents. They viewed it as eighteenth-century secular-oriented skeptics, disdainful of religious enthusiasm and in a vein of virtual rational incomprehensibility. Cruelty, fanaticism, arrogance were all elements that composed the mentality of religious fanatics. Hume wrote graphically of the religious persecution in sixteenth-century England and France that was a grisly feature of the Protestant-Catholic rupture of Christendom. Gibbon wove many twists and turns of Christian persecution into his narrative—it was a persistent, recurring element in his treatment of religion. The history of religion and the history of persecution seemed to be inexorably interwoven. His attention, however, was focused primarily on the unfolding of the history of Christian persecution: it is the Christian religion that triumphs over pagan Rome and imposes itself on the Western world.
If there be found among you, within any of thy gates which the Lord thy God giveth thee, man or woman, that hath wrought wickedness in the sight of the Lord thy God, in transgressing his covenant. And hath gone and served other gods, and worshiped them, either the sun or moon, or any of the host of heaven, which l have not commanded.... Then shalt thou bring forth that man or that woman, which have committed that wicked thing, unto thy gates, even that man or that woman, and shalt stone them with stones, till they die.
Deuteronomy 17:2–5.
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References
For a detailed historical study of persecution in Christianity, see E. S. P. Haynes, Religious Persecution: A Study in Political Psychology (London: Duckworth and Co., 1904). Wilbur Jordan’s The Development of Religious Toleration In England 4 vols. (1932–1940; reprint, Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1965 ) is a massive but splendid historical study dealing with the themes of religious persecution and religious toleration. Also see Scott L. Waugh and Peter D. Diehl, eds., Christendom and Its Discontents: Exclusion, Persecution, and Rebellion, 1000–1500 ( Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996 ).
G. C. Coulton, Inquisition and Liberty (Boston: Beacon Press, 1959), 15–16, writes that Constantine was more severe against heretical priests than against pagans.
See, H. A. Drake, “Lambs Into Lions: Explaining Early Christian Intolerance,” Past and Present 153 (Nov. 1996): 3–34. Drake faults Gibbon for an unfair and unbalanced presentation of Christianity as an intolerant, persecuting religion. Gibbon, he argues, plays down pagan persecutors and fails to acknowledge that Christians also spoke for freedom of conscience and toleration. Because of Gibbon, Christianity has born the odium of being a persecuting religion. “Here then is the problem: if early Christians could speak for toleration as well as intolerance, it is no longer possible to account for the turn to coercion by a newly empowered Christianity in the fourth century with the premise that such coercion was a natural, logical, or inevitable outcome of predictions inherent in and unique to that faith.” While I believe that Drake is correct in his assessment of Gibbon’s bias toward pagan Rome and his animus toward the early Christians, in Gibbon’s defense, it should be said that Gibbon did not, as Drake seems to suggest, hold Christianity to be uniquely intolerant. He argued that fanaticism is a pitfall for many forms of faith, particular for monotheistic forms such as Islam and Judaism, as well as Christianity.
Bayle, as Richard Popkin notes, developed a defense of religious toleration that extended to Jews, Socinians, Catholics, even atheists—far beyond where Locke would go in his Essay on Toleration. Encyclopedia of Philosophy,s.v. “Pierre Bayle.”
See Peter Brown, Augustine of Hippo: A Biography (New York: Dorset Press, 1986), particularly chapter 21, “Discipline” for a less harsh and probably fairer account of Augustine’s conflict with the Donatists. Brown’s Augustine is less hypocritical and opportunistic than Gibbon’s. Brown points out that the Donatists were “ruthless in defending themselves. Converts to Catholicism among their clergy were, especially, treated without mercy. The bishop of Bagai was set upon and left for dead by the congregation he had deserted to become a Catholic.... Theory and practice had gone hand in hand to reinforce Augustine’s change of mind.” (233)
Gay, Rise of Modern Paganism,84–86. “Thus the philosophes slighted whatever contribution Aristotle may have made to the scientific method; they saw him mainly as the favorite of the Scholastics—a pagan who had trafficked with the enemy. Their treatment of Plato, which has long perplexed and annoyed students of the eighteenth century, was equally shabby.”
Marie A. Martin, “Hume on Human Excellence,” Hume Studies 18, no. 2 (November 1992), 383–99, argues for an interpretation of Hume’s ethics that aligns him with the classical ethical tradition. “For Hume is a virtue ethicist, albeit one in modem dress, who, poised between the ancients and moderns, self-consciously chose to align himself with the ancient tradition, asserting its superiority over the modern. (383) While there is some truth in this—certainly Hume had an affinity with classical moralists like Cicero—the claim is quite misleading in my view. Hume was very much in opposition to all aspects of platonic philosophy including its ethical rationalism.
Gellner, Plough, Sword and Book,75.
For a philosophical study of the obfuscating use of language, see G. A. Wells, Belief and Make-Belief. Critical Reflections on the Sources of Credulity ( La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1991 ).
Pocock, “Gibbon’s Decline and Fall and the World View of the Late Enlightenment,” 144.
See Gellner, Plough, Sword and Book,75–76 who defines Platonism and explains its coercive features. “By generic Platonism I mean the kind of ideology that makes its appearance with the religious use of writing, and which is sustained by an organized clerisy.... Generic Platonism clearly delineates the Transcendent, and makes it morally and doctrinally authoritative without bounds, i.e., universalistic in its claims.”
Giuseppe Giarrizzo, “Toward the Decline and Fall: Gibbon’s Other Historical Interests,” in Edward Gibbon and the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,235. “In February, 1761 Gibbon published the Essai cur l’étude de la littérature. The structure and methodological objectives of this work, which was written partly in Lausanne and partly in Buriton, are very complex. The chapters written in Lausanne deal with the polemic against ’l’esprit de système’ as distinct from the ‘esprit philosophique,’ and here Gibbon espouses Montesquieu’s thought. In England, however, after reading Hume’s Natural History of Religion (1757), Gibbon wrote chapters 57 and 58 which deal with the pagan ‘system.”’
Giarrizzo, “Toward the Decline and Fall: Gibbon’s Other Historical Interests,” 236 writes that the Es.sai’s theme is “the historical erudition that rejects the ’esprit de.système,’ when research and facts demonstrate the abstract and superficially all-embracing nature of the ‘system’ while at the same time attempting to liberate knowledge of the past—which is necessary to legitimize or modify the present—from the tenets of Pyrrhonism.”
Livingston, Hume’s Philosophy of Common Life,5. Also, Danford, David Hume and the Problem of Reason,77, has a similar view. “[T]he full Humean philosophy-is best represented by the History of England,along with the Essays and the posthumous Dialogues.”
See P. Russell, “Epigram, Pantheists, and Freethought in Hume’s Treatise,660–61. Russell argues that the Treatise is fully anti-Christian in its intentions and that it was aimed specifically at the Christian rationalism of Samuel Clarke, an argument that would support my contention that Hume had a strong desire to refute claims for the rationality of Christianity. Moreover, Russell argues that Hume writes in a conscious spirit of free thinking that traces its pedigree back through the deists and anti-Christians such as John Toland and Anthony Collins to Hobbes and Spinoza.
Arthur Schopenhauer, “The Christian System,” in The Pessimist’s Handbook: A Collection of’ Popular Essays, trans. T. Bailey Saunders, ed. Hazel E. Barnes (Lincoln, NE.: University of Nebraska Press, 1964 ), 311–12.
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Foster, S.P. (1997). Persecution, Platonism, and the Virulence of Metaphysics. In: Melancholy Duty. International Archives of the History of Ideas / Archives Internationales D’histoire des Idées, vol 154. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-2235-3_5
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