Religion, Barbarism and the Fall of the Roman Empire

Evelyn Waugh’s novel Helena tells the story of the mother of Constantine, the first Christian emperor in Rome, who granted religious toleration to the Christian minority (10 per cent?) in 313 AD. In the book, he has Lactantius, “the Christian Cicero” and adviser to Constantine, saying to Helena:

Suppose in the years to come, when the Christian troubles seem to be over, there should come an apostate of my own trade, a false historian with the mind of Cicero or Tacitus and the soul of an animal … a man like that might make it his business to write down the martyrs and excuse the persecutors. He might be refuted again and again but what he wrote down would remain in people’s minds … that is what style does—it has the Egyptian secret of the embalmers. It is not to be despised.

Waugh was writing about Edward Gibbon, and while the “animal” reference is cruel, the judgment is correct. Gibbon is unrelentingly hostile to Christianity.

The first volume of The Decline and…