Hitherto we have avoided the topic of “Religion,” which for Gibbon was, alongside “Barbarism,” one of the two key factors in the collapse of the West. We have been able to do so because social, economic, and political interpretations of Rome's Fall have largely been divorced from dis-cussions of religious change during the period. Although there have been notable exceptions, most scholars have tended either to talk of politics, economics, and society, or of religion and culture. As we noted, Rostovtzeff regret-ted his failure to deal with the whole picture. Despite the regrets of the Russian historian, few have been as success-ful as Gibbon in keeping an eye simultaneously on both the religious and the non-religious aspects of the story.

Even in his own day Gibbon himself was unusual in making religion central to his interpretation of the fall of Rome. His French predecessors—among them, of course, Montesquieu, as a leading Enlightenment scholar—had said little about the Church. Moreover, it was the negative role that Gibbon assigned to Christianity in Chapters 15 and 16 that most provoked criticism of Decline and Fall at the time of publication and in the nineteenth century: the secular elements in his account fared better than did the religious. In the middle of the nineteenth century, however, there were scholars, particularly Catholic scholars, who did come to place religion at the heart of their reading of the end of the Roman Empire, albeit from a very different viewpoint from that taken by Gibbon. Above all there was Antoine-Frédéric Ozanam, writing in the 1840s. For him rather than being a factor in the fall of the West, Christianity was in fact responsible for salvaging classical civilization. The corrupt Roman Empire had been overthrown by barbarians, who had nothing to put in its place: it therefore fell to the Church to save what was worthwhile from Antiquity and to cast it in a new Christian mould. This spiritually engaged reading of the end of the Roman World ran parallel to but had little impact on the secular read-ings of the period, which revolved around either Rome's weaknesses or the strength of the barbarians.