SOURCE: Pocock, J. G. A. “Superstition and Enthusiasm in Gibbon's History of Religion.” Eighteenth-Century Life 8, no. 1 (October 1982): 83-94.

In the following lecture, originally presented at a conference in October 1981, Pocock identifies religion as the central concern in the Decline and Fall.

The Decline and Fall, from beginning to end—and the later volumes richly reward close study—is profoundly concerned with the capacity of religion in its various forms to stabilise, to destroy, and to reconstitute the fabric of civilised society; so that history is largely determined by religion, and religion—while reduced from the sacred to the secular dimension—is one of the greatest phenomena of history. In this sense, Gibbon's history of religion is essential to the structure and texture of his work as a whole; and I intend in this essay to argue that it is organised around—though it does not mechanically apply—the...