22 | CHAPTER 2
indifference” between the two camps.^12 In his Vindication, Gibbon expands
on the historiographical juncture at which he finds himself:
About two hundred years ago, the Court of Rome discovered that the
system which had been erected by ignorance must be defended and
countenanced by the aid, or at least by the abuse, of science. The grosser
legends of the middle ages were abandoned to contempt, but the su-
premacy and infallibility of two hundred Popes, the virtues of many
thousand Saints, and the miracles which they either performed or re-
lated, have been laboriously consecrated in the Ecclesiastical Annals of
Cardinal Baronius. A Theological Barometer might be formed, of
which the Cardinal and our countryman Dr. [Conyers] Middleton [d.
1750] should constitute the opposite and remote extremities, as the
former sunk to the lowest degree of credulity, which was compatible
with learning, and the latter rose to the highest pitch of scepticism, in
any wise consistent with Religion.... It would be amusing enough to
calculate the weight of prejudice in the air of Rome, of Oxford, of
Paris, and of Holland; and sometimes to observe the irregular tendency
of Papists towards freedom, sometimes to remark the unnatural gravi-
tation of Protestants towards slavery.^13
Even Gibbon necessarily remained, to a great extent, an ecclesiastical his-
torian. But while acknowledging this, the most eminent present- day student
of his thought can also recognize in him an Enlightened historian of late
Antiquity.^14 In fact Gibbon’s originality goes still further, for part of his at-
tempt to get beyond the impasse described in the passage just quoted is the
generous narrative attention he pays—already noted in chapter 1—to the
Islamic empires, in “total ignorance of the Oriental tongues.”^15 As for his
opinion of Muhammad and his religion, it is inflected by Enlightenment
irony and a wish to tar Christianity by comparison—or at least orthodox
Anglicanism as distinct from Unitarianism. (When Dr Johnson imagined
Gibbon once a “Mahometan,” he no doubt meant by that a Unitarian.)^16 yet
12 E.g., Gibbon 49: 3.90 n. 11, 93 n. 18 (whence the quotation), 58: 565 n. 22; and the important
passage, 54: 436–39.
13 E. Gibbon, A Vindication [ed. D. Womersley, in Gibbon 37: 3.1108–84] 1151; cf. Gibbon 37:
2.442 n. 115.
14 Pocock 1.4–5, 30, 42; 2.378–79, 402; 5.89–212.
15 Gibbon 50: 3.151 n. 1, 52: 3.353.
16 D. Womersley, Gibbon and the “Watchmen of the Holy City” (Oxford 2002) 147–72, placing
Gibbon’s composition of his account of Islam in the 1780s against the background of the Trinitarian
controversies raging at that time. Gibbon describes Muslims as “Unitarians” at 3.178, 191, 550, etc. On
radical Protestant anti- Trinitarian/Socinian/Unitarian sympathy for Islam, from the later sixteenth to the
early eighteenth centuries, see M. Mulsow, “Socinianism, Islam and the radical uses of Arabic scholarship,”
Al- Qantara 31 (2010) 549–86.