Daily Blog 3 Week 9

Konnor Drewen

4/6/011

Summarize and Compare Gibbon to Toynbee on the End of the Roman Empire.

            Gibbons approach to the end of the Roman Empire was more to say that any empire of above moderateness will eventually fall because of its pure stature and greatness. He also said that it could have been because of the decay of Roma, but less likely because Roma had been divided before and it did not become removed.  Christianity had some influence on the decline and fall of the Roman Empire according to Gibbon. The clergy successfully preached the doctrines of patience. The active virtues of society were discouraged. Gibbon said that faith, zeal, curiosity, and the more earthly passions of malice and ambition kindled the flame of theological discord; the church, was distracted by religious factions, whose conflicts were sometimes bloody; the attention of the emperors was diverted from camps to church councils; the Roman world was oppressed by a new species of tyranny; and the persecuted factions became the secret enemies of their country. Toynbee has one of the oldest views in which Christianity was the destroyer of the civilization. He also says that before we accept the role of Christianity and of the other religions in social history which represents these religions as being mere instruments for assisting in the process of civilization, in every instance of the parent-and-child relation between civilizations, we find a church intervening between the parent civilization and the daughter civilization. Toynbee finds that if you look at the histories of the ancient civilizations of South-Western Asia and Egypt, you find there an elementary higher religion in the form of the worship of a god and a related goddess.