The Pelikan and the Gibbon

I have started reading The Excellent Empire, the Fall of Rome and the Triumph of the Church by Jaroslav Pelikan. Essentially the book is a collection of extended conversations with Edward Gibbon and his views on the fall of Rome and the rise of Christianity. Consequently I love it.

In a passage describing the struggle within the Third Century Christian community over whether or not a man who had sinned could possibly be a priest (sometimes called the Donatist Controversy) Pelikan makes the arresting statement about the nature of the Church that should still be valid:

The church was not a moral all-star team for which one could qualify by being an athlete of holiness; it was a moral hospital in which, by the medicine of the sacraments, one could be gradually healed -- provided that one subjected oneself to the discipline of the doctors and nurses.

Pelikan then goes on to discuss many other aspects of the social triumph of the Church within the empire, always in dialogue with some of the most famous quotes from Gibbon, including his boast that

In the preceding volumes of this History, I have described the triumph of barbarism and religion.

Pelikin then goes on at length to show what this might mean.