Peter Brown on Christian Attitudes to Wealth in the Late Roman West

Through Eye of a Needle: Wealth, Fall of Rome and Making of Christianity in West, 350-550 AD, by Peter Brown. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2012. 816 pp. $39.95 US (cloth). For half a century Peter Brown has been a prolific and highly influential historian of Late Antiquity. The structure of his latest and (by more than 100 pages) longest book, to which its main title merely alludes, resembles in several ways a set of variations on theme stated in its subtitle--Wealth, Fall of Rome, and Making of Christianity in West, 350-550 AD. The first of its five parts comprises four chapters delineating relevant social background of what follows (pp. 1-90). The next thirteen chapters concentrate on period before sack of Rome in 410: most of them assess attitudes to wealth of a series of individual authors including pagan Symmachus and Christians Ambrose, Augustine, and Paulinus of Nola (pp. 91-288). The third and fourth sections, which are briefer, have titles An Age of Crisis (pp. 289-384) and Aftermaths (pp. 385-453): together these two sections cover first three decades of fifth Gaul down to 450 and Italy before Byzantine invasion, while fifth section, entitled Toward Another World, considers sixth century (pp. 454-526). The twenty-nine chapters are supplemented by more than a hundred pages of endnotes (pp. 533-640), a bibliography of nearly eighty pages (pp. 641-717), and an index of forty-one pages (pp. 719-59). Brown also summarizes content of his long book in a very brief conclusion of four pages (pp. 527-30). Despite its length, book has a simple main thesis. Brown argues that Christian church in West saw an influx of wealth only after 370 and that this sudden influx brought with it lively controversies over proper use of wealth by Christians which lasted for two generations. After c. 430, however, of wealth created in fourth century evaporated or changed its structures in brutal crisis of fifth century, and the Christian churches found themselves in a generally impoverished world, in which the central institutions of Roman world lost much of their mystique, while there was consolidation on local level, and the collapse of traditional aristocracies left church in a unique position (pp. 529-30). These developments hastened the great turn towards other world that has been held to mark end of ancient world and beginning of middle ages (p. 530). Brown's bibliography is divided, in line with an unfortunate and misleading modern convention, into Primary Sources (pp. 641-54) and Secondary Sources (pp. 654-717). Brown uses latter term to designate modern studies, but modern works ought not to be called at all, since they do not constitute historical evidence for ancient world in any real sense. For Brown, however, these secondary sources do often function as source from which he has taken an interpretation that he then seeks to confirm by reference to ancient evidence. Hence, although Brown quotes and discusses an enormous range of ancient evidence, his interpretations are often neither derived from ancient evidence nor based primarily upon it. He seems rather to have formulated central themes of Eye of a Needle in light of his own earlier historical interpretations and his wide reading of modern writers such as Averil Cameron, Clifford Geertz, Ramsay MacMullen, Amaldo Momigliano, Paul Veyne, and many others. In itself of course this method of historical research and writing is perfectly legitimate, and Brown showers his readers with an enormous range of unborrowed erudition and a large number of stimulating ideas and apercus on specific issues, situations and writers. But his modern guides have sometimes led him astray into preferring their interpretations over ancient evidence. …

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