Towards the end of the first century AD, a Roman emperor met the family of Jesus Christ. Domitian had this failed Messiah’s relatives hauled before him while he was traveling in Palestine to make sure that they posed no threat to his power. They turned out to be farmers; as soon as he saw their calloused hands, “despising them as beneath his notice,” he let them go.
Historian Peter Brown’s handling of this encounter in Treasure in Heaven: The Holy Poor in Early Christianity (2016), his last monograph, typifies the methods and preoccupations of his lengthy and prolific career. What matters about the anecdote, culled from a fourth-century church historian, is not whether it was true; rather, its importance lies in the big realities it expresses about the society which recounted it. By that time, Christianity had entered a world that refused to take laboring people seriously as intellectual or political figures. The insistence of its theologians on the holiness of poverty soon altered but could not obliterate the assurance of Roman elites. No historian has evoked more vividly the strange waltz between a transcendent faith and earthly powers in the centuries from Constantine to Muhammad (a period the book’s author named “late antiquity”) than Peter Brown. Journeys of the Mind: A Life in History is a gripping new memoir about how he came to do it.
