Journeys of the Mind

Peter Brown’s engaging book Journeys of the Mind: A Life in History is best described as an intellectual autobiography. Although it treats many topics, it is primarily an account of how and why he came to focus his life’s work on the period of late antiquity in which Christianity, rabbinic Judaism, and Islam arose, and Rome fell. This is the central journey recounted in this book, but there are others: the journey of his education, from Avalon and Shrewsbury schools in Ireland to Oxford University in the United Kingdom; of his career, from Oxford to the University of London, then onwards to Berkeley and Princeton; of his travels, including to Sudan as a child, and to Iran as an adult; and, perhaps most important, of his encounters with the books and people who shaped his scholarly work. The book also takes us on a journey through the changes in Irish and British society, and higher education through much of the twentieth century, often with reference to his own ancestors and family history. These journeys are recounted at a leisurely pace over approximately 700 pages. Thanks, however, to the humor, the conversational tone, and the intrinsically interesting content, these journeys pass as pleasantly as a cross-country train ride through an ever-changing landscape.

The story is framed by Brown’s reflections on the discovery, after his mother’s death in 1987, of two announcements of his birth. These were clipped from two different newspapers, one from Ireland, where the family was based, and one from Sudan, where Brown’s father was working at the time of his son’s birth. Framing his journeys in this way ties his beginnings in Ireland to what became his life’s work. As he writes, his background and childhood, which included visits to Sudan to see his father, may explain “certain affinities” between what he learned as a child growing up in Ireland and the scholarly questions to which he has devoted his career. These affinities include the lifelong conviction that religious ideas can have a powerful impact on society (5) and the attraction to “unfamiliar tracts of history often buried beneath a mound of modern prejudice” (6).

Brown is best known—and revered—as the scholar who put the study of late antiquity on the religious studies map. As a student reading history at Oxford, he was torn between two well-defined areas of study: the Middle Ages and the Roman Empire. When he came upon Henri-Irénée Marrou’s study of Augustine and the end of ancient culture (Saint-Augustin et la fin de la culture antique, de Boccard, 1938), he realized that if he framed his area of interest as “late antiquity” he would not have to choose between these two areas.

In doing so, Brown also challenged the well-entrenched tendency to see a rupture between antiquity and the Middle Ages. Instead of framing the end of the Roman empire as a decline and fall (à la Edward Gibbon), he focused on the empire’s influence continued through the middle ages and beyond. In his view, late antiquity did not mark the end of a civilization but rather marked its “transformation into new and adventurous forms which would influence subsequent centuries” (369). Brown was eager to move the study of the Roman Empire away from the “Pontius Pilate complex,” which identified the Roman Empire with the British Raj; focused on politics and administration; and relegated religion to a secondary role (221). In his 1971 book, The World of Late Antiquity, he insisted that the study of late antiquity and its influence should not be limited to the Roman Empire but should include Mesopotamia, Arabia, and Iran, and should expand beyond Christianity to encompass also Islam and Judaism.

Although Brown describes some periods of his life as solitary, this account implies a lively sense of scholarly community. Among the works and scholars with whom he interacted, and who influenced him greatly, are some from outside the field of late antiquity. One such influence was Mary Douglas, whose work showed him a path away from the usual dualistic view of religion and society, and enabled him to see them as “two faces of the same social structure which spoke of its own stresses and strains through the language of religion: myths, dogmas, rituals, miracle stories, and hagiographies” and to see a coherence between symbolic and social experience (353). This approach led Brown to see beyond the work, for example, of the church fathers and other privileged texts to other types of evidence, including inscriptions, magical papyri, dream books and horoscope collections (354). Another major influence was Michel Foucault, whose publications, along with hours of conversation helped Brown move away from anachronistic approaches to sexuality in the ancient world and to contextualize the Christian ascetic movement against the background of the empire’s unraveling in his book The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity (Columbia UP, 1988). 

Also in evidence is Brown’s sense of humor. He briefly and vividly recounts an evening when he was late returning to his college. With a small crowd watching, “I turned to my audience, bowed deeply, and dropped over the side [of the wall] onto the compost heap that was conveniently piled high against the college wall” (201). On another occasion, while attending the 4^th international Oxford Patristics Conference in 1963, he found himself explaining to a German professor exactly how one might rob a train, expertise he gained not by personal experience, but because he was an “almost eye-witness” to the Great Train Robbery, which had taken place the month before (262).

Interspersed between these brief anecdotes, and the more detailed reflections on the changing university, meetings with scholars, and ideas he found in books, are glimpses of the man himself: his stuttering especially as a child and young man; his experiences of solitude and loneliness; his travels with and without writing in his diary; and his love of family and friends. He mentioned but does not dwell on relationships and other personal experiences, except when it comes to his parents, his Aunt Teedah (Freda), and, movingly, Arnaldo Momigliano, whom he remembers at the end of the book for his “qualities of scholar, mentor, and friend, for which he was not only held in awe, but loved” (671), certainly by Brown himself. Yet, throughout, his deep humanity shines through.

It is a deep pleasure to accompany Brown on his journeys, intellectual and otherwise, and thereby to get a sense of the man, the world in which he grew up and thrived, and the field that he shaped.

Adele Reinhartz is Distinguished University Professor in the Department of Classics and Religious Studies at the University of Ottawa.

Adele Reinhartz

Date Of Review:

March 26, 2024