Abstract
It is overstating the case to say that Peter Brown invented the field of modern English-language Late Antiquity Studies, but not by much. A prolific writer and remarkable teacher, Brown has influenced many theologians through his work, starting with his biography of Augustine (Augustine of Hippo, London: Faber and Faber, 1967) and stretching through to more recent work on the distinctive place of wealth in early Christian thought and practice.
This is an intellectual biography. But it starts with scores of pages dedicated to describing Brown’s childhood as the only child of a middle-class Protestant couple in south Dublin. When you consider that the reader has approached the 600th page before we hear mention of his wife, this could seem like an odd choice. But reading it as a Protestant who lives in Dublin, it made perfect sense to me. To explain how Peter Brown came to be, he has to explain how he was raised in a context that was neither extraordinarily wealthy nor supremely well-educated but was privileged by a certain cultural pre-eminence. And his people expressed that lingering sense of ascendancy through their love of books. Throughout his career, Brown has displayed a remarkable ability to be on the cutting edge of research in his field and to write for the educated and interested reader who is not in his field. How often he recounts consuming books by the stove in his parents’ kitchen—these things are connected.
After preparatory school south of Dublin, Brown finds himself at Oxford and that is where the book takes off. He recalls the various steps he took to arrive at the point where he resisted easier paths to focus on that era that was squashed between the fall of the Western Empire and the rise of the Middle Ages. His work would be central in clarifying that this period was not just transitional but has an integrity of its own. Journeys of the Mind goes beyond Brown’s own writing in sharing with the reader the extent to which he sees Late Antiquity as bound up not just with Europe but with the emerging Islamic world, stretching as far as modern-day Afghanistan.
The book is broken into six parts. After the chapters on his childhood, we discover how he wound up as a scholar in All Souls after finishing his degree. Part III focuses on the work that led to his famous biography of Hippo’s most acclaimed bishop. But again, the broadness of mind is on display as he recounts the excitement he felt as he discovered Anthropology and befriended Mary Douglas.
And that highlights another feature of the book. In the hands of a less humble writer, it could be described as a ‘name-dropping’ text. Retreating to the pub with Michel Foucault, reading Milton under C.S. Lewis, advising Iris Murdoch, befriending Pierre Hadot—the names of the people Brown crossed path with and learned from is a who’s-who of twentieth-century scholarship. But the reader is not overwhelmed. Instead, we are reminded of the excitement we ourselves have surely felt at meeting a teacher who cracked something open for us for the first time or an academic hero who turns out to have been worthy of the respect we had for them.
As already referenced, Brown’s immense regard for the cultures of the Middle East is never far from the surface and Part IV concludes with a description of a decisive visit to Iran a few years before the Revolution. Having left his own Christian practice behind in his undergraduate days, this journey across a country he had read about so extensively stirred something in him, especially the devotion of the small remaining community of Zoroastrians. The section closes with one of the few insights into his own personal life: ‘I came to feel that there was nothing strange about the desire to worship God. On my return, after a lapse of twenty years, I resumed regular attendance at a Christian church’ (p. 444).
Brown moved on from Oxford to Royal Holloway and then on to Berkeley in the 1970s. That story is completed in Part V. Part VI describes his arrival at Princeton, where he is still based. There was an interlude while he was a professor at Berkeley where he spent a number of years resident in Venice. We discover how this came to be in Chapter 88. The prose flows easily over the remarkable tale of how his enjoyment of the Poland versus Italy match at the 1982 World Cup was interrupted by a phone call from an American stranger ‘with the heavy tone of someone who had settled down to the pleasant task (maybe, I liked to think, with a whiskey in hand) of telling a lot of people a lot of very good news’ (p. 606). Though Brown did not know what it was, he had been awarded a MacArthur Genius grant and that allowed him and his wife to live among the Gondolas for years without teaching obligations. She finished her PhD. He studied and wrote and perfected his banter with the waiting staff at the nearby bar.
The book really comes to a close in 1987. Considering the carbon footprint involved in shipping such monumental tomes, one struggles to welcome the prospect of a second volume. There is a part of me that suspects that the old canard applies to Journeys of the Mind—it would be twice as good if half as long. But I think that would be unfair. Stanley Hauerwas—someone who knows how to write a great memoir—addresses the kind of tedious books that acclaimed academics often write. He notes that ‘in general, an autobiography is characterized by this kind of grammar: “On Saturday I was in San Francisco giving this lecture and then on Monday of the following week I went to Singapore”.’ He adds, ‘If that’s an autobiography, I knew I did not want to do that. The last thing in the world I wanted to turn it into is a travelogue or “this is the story of my success; look at all these things I did!”’ (Brian Brock and Stanley Hauerwas, Beginnings: Interrogating Hauerwas (London: T&T Clark, 2017), p. 15).
But while we do hear a lot about Brown’s guest lectures in Paris or in Maynooth, and we hear his recollections about writing this book or that paper, the preoccupation of this book is overwhelmingly the things he read, the journeys he made, and the conversations he had which moved his thinking on. This is neither memoir nor autobiography. It is something rarer. The goal here is not to get you to think well of Peter Brown, but to spur you into your own recollection of such journeys as you watch him trace his.
And this is where it is useful to Christian ethicists, even if your work does not fall into the particular areas that are illuminated by his research. He writes at one point about how Mary Douglas impressed upon him the need to inhabit ‘a tone of voice with which to write about a phenomenon as seemingly alien to modern persons as sorcery in late antiquity and the early Middle Ages’ (p. 329). This tone of voice is required by us as we seek to argue for the enduring relevance of the strange beliefs and practices that have emerged from the story of a man who was tortured to death and came back from the afterlife three days later. It helps, of course, that Brown simply ‘likes’ the characters and cultures that he studies (p. 390). And that underneath the erudition lies a fundamentally humanistic appreciation of the ‘perilous immensity of the inner world’ (p. 255). There is much here for us to reflect on with regards to our craft.
I did not keep a detailed list, but I recall that in the course of reading, we discover Brown is fluent in German, French, Italian, Latin, Hebrew, Greek, Syriac, Russian, Czech, Serbo-Croat, Coptic, Arabic, and Turkish. He doesn’t tell us if he is fluent in Irish. He is a man who has fallen in love with learning. He reads. And then he talks to people about what he has read. And when he can’t have a conversation with people, he writes his thoughts down. This is a portrait of a scholar. It is not essential reading by any measure. But it will reward anyone who is tempted to read along with him.