Historians and classicists considered the last centuries of the Roman Empire an era of obscurity and decline until Peter Brown led a generation of scholars in illuminating them.
From Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, in 1776, until Brown’s first books, in the 1960s, the period from the third century AD to about the eighth, when Christianity thrived in the barbarian kingdoms that swept Rome away, was commonly conceived as an auxiliary Later Roman Empire and even as the Dark Ages. Now, thanks in large part to Brown, those centuries are Late Antiquity, an acknowledgment that Western civilization did, indeed, continue to advance.
With his latest book, the Irish-born Brown, now an emeritus professor of history at Princeton University, provides more compelling evidence about just what those years were like in the increasingly Christian West, and in particular about the role of wealth as institutional Christianity gained ground. The book, released late last year by Princeton University Press, has a title as imposing as the text—540 pages plus 200 more of notes: Through the Eye of a Needle: Wealth, the Fall of Rome, and the Making of Christianity in the West, 350-550 AD.
The title, of course, comes from Jesus’ proverb that it is easier for a camel to fit through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter heaven. Elsewhere, Jesus tells a wealthy man to “sell what you possess and give to the poor and you will have treasure in heaven.”
That posed a problem for wealthy Christians, and even for those of modest means. Brown’s view is that they resolved it by believing they could save themselves from the depredations of money by making the church flush, so that it could provide welfare in an empire in crisis. That transformed Christianity into a worldly power and with that, writes Brown, began Europe’s progress toward the opulent Roman Catholic culture of the Middle Ages.
Brown shows that the concept of righteous giving, while not fully divesting one’s wealth, took hold after an ascetic attitude lost out to a more earthly one, espoused by St. Augustine. He argued that to renounce all material goods thwarted the church’s worldly work. What came to drive donors’ “daily acts of kindness and generosity,” then, was their deep conviction that any generosity to the church “joined heaven and earth.”
Writing in Bryn Mawr Classical Review, Kyle Harper, an associate professor of classics and letters at the University of Oklahoma, said that thanks to the “unerring moral balance” Brown brings to his subject, “perhaps for the first time, the problem of wealth in early Christianity is treated in full, with no righteous fury at blatant hypocrisy nor any apology for a church that rationalized its enrichment by feeding the poor.”
“Predictably brilliant,” “a masterpiece,” “vast,” “remarkably readable,” was the estimation of Garry Wills, who has called Brown’s book his favorite of 2012.
Last month the Princeton press received the R.R. Hawkins Award from the Association of American Publishers for “professional and scholarly excellence.” It was not the first honor for Brown; in 2008 he was one of two winners of the Library of Congress’s Kluge Prize for Lifetime Achievement in the Study of Humanity, and shared its $1-million purse.
Sales figures for Through the Eye of a Needle have been impressive for a 2.8-pound scholarly tome. At 13,000 copies, it was top seller in 2012 for Princeton, which has sold rights for French, German, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish editions.
Brown’s long succession of eye-opening publications began in 1967, with the biography Augustine of Hippo, which set the North African church father and saint in his time and place. Then followed such books as The World of Late Antiquity: From Marcus Aurelius to Muhammad, in 1971, which made a case for dispensing with the standard view of Rome’s collapse.
Brown next wrote about the Christian cult of saints; he explained how it eased the anxiety of converts from paganism who were losing their own deities. Many more books, on such subjects as blessed chastity, have followed.
Throughout, Brown has been “deservedly famous” among historians for his originality and “memorable aperçus and turns of phrase,” the historian G.W. Bowersock wrote last November in The New Republic. He cited Brown’s ability to “tease, enchant, and instruct” readers.
John Dillon, a professor of Greek at Trinity College Dublin and a former colleague of Brown, says that the author, like a fine poet, has an uncanny ability to “get into the minds of people of Late Antiquity and see what makes them tick, what makes sense to them.”
It was Brown’s training among historians rather than classicists—"who tended to follow the crowd"—that helped him gain fresh perspectives on Late Antiquity, Dillon says. By phone from Princeton, Brown agrees. He was trained as a medievalist, studying an era of communes, trade guilds, and other civic institutions. “I was always a bit frustrated by the sort of texts Edward Gibbon used. ... They were all written by a very narrow elite.” Even towering scholars like Oxford’s Sir Ronald Syme commanded “tremendous knowledge of the Roman upper class, but with a sort of lordly contempt for the average Joes.”
The ancient world has fascinated Brown since childhood. He gained “a sense of the wider world,” he says, during visits to his father, an engineer who worked in Sudan. (“I’m told I met the emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia in Khartoum, but I don’t remember it.”)
Brown gravitated to the fall of Rome in part because he was of the post-World War II generation, and “we grew up with an alarmist view that Europe was going, and going very suddenly, the way of the Roman Empire,” he says.
But why rethink the accepted history of Rome’s demise? “The young are always cussed,” is his good-humored explanation. “I always felt that the conception of the fall of the Roman Empire was overdramatized.”
How dark was that era, he wondered, when it produced glorious churches and countless other treasures? Among those that impressed him were abstract mosaics as extraordinary as any avant-garde works of his own time. Such artifacts informed what he considered a common-sense view of Late Antiquity: “The Roman Empire had a very low literacy rate, only 10 percent. So what people saw was extremely important. People have spoken of Roman cities, like great Christian churches, as arguments in stone.”
Brown is 77. Retire? “From teaching I did, a year and a half ago. From scribbling? I doubt it.” Two books based on lecture series he has given in recent years are on the way; they include his thoughts on such topics as the finances of the earliest Christians, and how the notion of purgatory arose.
“The only thing that has retired is my paycheck, frankly,” Brown says. “It’s probably down in Florida, enjoying itself.”