Isaac de Beausobre: heresy, philosophy, history

Abstract

BEAUSOBRE AND GIBBON: THE OCCASIONAL PRESENCE Beausobre's Histoire de Manichee et du Manicheisme (1734–9) is an exception among Gibbon's sources for the Church before Constantine in that, unlike the works of Fleury, Tillemont, Le Clerc or Mosheim, it is not a historia ecclesiastica though it is a contribution to that field of study. That is to say, it is not a history of the Church as an organised body, divine and human; it has no narrative structure and does not, like Eusebius, Tillemont or as we shall see Mosheim, consider how such a history should be written in terms of the experiences the Church underwent and the characteristics it acquired as a result. There is nothing about the persecutions, or the transmission and construction of authority. What it has in common with the other histories Gibbon read is a concern with heresy, and therefore with orthodoxy, as phenomena whose presence in Christian history needs to be explained and understood; and it shares with other texts of the Protestant early Enlightenment a tendency to question this presence and lessen the rigour with which heresy and orthodoxy can be defined, condemned or upheld. The heresies (as he does not hesitate to call them) that concern Beausobre in the history of the second and third centuries are those known as ‘gnostic’ and described by Irenaeus, Epiphanius and other Fathers.