TIME: BEyOND LATE ANTIQUITy | 23Gibbon can almost be said to show true sympathy for the Prophet’s rationali-
t y.^17 “The Mahometans have uniformly withstood the temptation of reduc-
ing the object of their faith and devotion to a level with the senses and imagi-
nation of man.”^18 No project designed to assert Islam’s relevance to study of
the closing phase of Antiquity can afford to ignore Gibbon.
After 1800, the traditional preeminence of theolog y ceded place to phi-
lolog y and history. The critical, contextualizing approach already applied to
the admired literature of Greek and Roman Antiquity began to be deployed
on the Bible too. The consequences were not necessarily reductive, and the
preoccupation with scripture continued to be immensely fertilizing. This
was especially the case in Germany, whose academic culture was less agnostic
than that of the French, less utilitarian and present- oriented than that of the
British and Dutch. Especially in the Protestant theolog y faculties, exegesis of
the Old Testament remained a major concern, and this entailed knowledge
at the very least of Hebrew, and also of the other peoples on whom Israelite
history touched: Eg yptians, Assyrians, Babylonians, and Iranians. The main
issue was the uniqueness—or not—of the Jews and their scriptures. It was
inevitable that the New Testament too would eventually be historicized and
contextualized; and when this happened, toward the end of the nineteenth
century, there was an efflorescence of interest in rabbinic Judaism, Gnosti-
cism, and the other religious currents of the Greek and Roman worlds. This
was the so- called religious- historical school, which exhumed a vast range of
Hellenistic and Roman spiritual and intellectual experience from neglect im-
posed by generations of “classical” purists, and cleared the way for broader
study of comparative religion at the end of Antiquity.^19
Burckhardt to Strzygowski
In short, the impetus theological and philosophical concerns gave to interest
in late Antiquity up to and including the nineteenth century can hardly be
exaggerated. One might in principle imagine that this emphasis on ideas—
the world of the mind—would favor a relatively generous chronological defi-
nition of late Antiquity. Do not Judaism and Christianity lead naturally on
toward Islam? In practice, though, Christian scholarship followed its patris-
tic sources and took inordinate interest in the destruction of paganism, seen
as well under way by 400 and complete by the time of Justinian (529!). It also
17 Gibbon 50: 3.177–78, 184, 187, 190, 192, 212, 230, 51: 3.316. His esteem for Muhammad’s
rationality was not without recent precedent: B. Lewis, Islam and the West (New york 1993) 89–90.
18 Gibbon 50: 3.230.
19 M. Mazza, Tra Roma e Costantinopoli (Catania 2009) 16–35; S. L. Marchand, German Oriental-
ism in the age of empire (Cambridge 2009), esp. 259–70, 282–91.