Society and the Holy in Late Antiquity

352 Pages·1982·18.43 MB·English

by  Peter Brown

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PETER BROWN
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS
BERKELEY & LOS ANGELES
University of California Press
Berkeley and Los Angeles, California
© 1982 by
The Regents of the University of California
Printed in the United States of America
2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Brown, Peter Robert Lamont.
Society and the holy in late antiquity.
Includes index.
I. Rome-Religion-Collected works. 2. Rome-Histor
-284-476-Collected works. 3. Church history-Primi
tive and early church, ca. 30-600-Collected works.
I. Title.
BL805·B74 1981 270.2 80-39862
ISBN 0-520-04305-7
CONTENTS
Preface vii
PART I
APPROACHES
Learning and lmagination 3
(Inaugural Lecture, Royal Holloway College, 1977)
Gibbon's Views on Culture and Society in the Fifth
and Sixth Centuries 22
(Dae da lus cv tl9761 : 73-88; Edwar d GI.b bon and the Dech.n e an d Fall of
the Roman Empire, 1977, pp. 37-52)
In Gibbon's Shade 49
(New York Review of Books xxm (19761: 14-18)
63
Mohammed and Charlemagne by Henri Pirenne
(Daedallls cm t19741: 25-31)
PART 11
SOClETY AND THE HOLY
The Last Pagan Emperor:
Robert Browning's The Emperor Julian 83
(Times Literary Supplement, 8 April 1977. pp. 425-26)
v
CONTENTS
The Rise and Function of the Holy Man
in Late Antiquity 103
(Joumal of Roman Studies LXI [1971]: 80-101)
Town, Village and Holy Man: The Case of Syria 153
a
(Assimilation et resistance la culture greco-romaine dans
le monde ancien, 1976, pp. 213-20)
Eastern and Western Christendom in Late Antiquity:
A Parting of the Ways 166
(The Orthodox Churches and the West, 1976, pp. 1-24)
The View from the Precipice 196
(New York Review oJBooks XXI [19741: 3-5)
Artifices of Eternity 207
(written with Sabine MacCormack,
New York Review oJBooks XXII [19751: 19-22)
Relics and Social Status
in the Age of Gregory of Tours 222
(The Stenton Lecture, 1976; University of Reading, 1977)
A Dark Age Crisis:
Aspects of the Iconoclastic Controversy 251
(English Historical'Review LXXXVIII [19731: 1-34)
Society and the Supernatural: A Medieval Change 302
(Daedalus CIV [19751: 133-51)
Index 333
PREFACE
I have brought together these articles, the fruit of a dec
ade of work since the appearance of my Religion and Society in
the Age of Saint Augustine, in the hope that to have them col
lected in one volume would be both convenient and even,
perhaps, instructive to the reader. I have, therefore, added
between square brackets those works which have since be
come available to me, that appear to me to add to the argu
ment of those articles which already carried footnotes; and I
have added some footnotes, in much the same spirit, to arti
cles and reviews which either appeared without footnotes or
which appear to me now to carry insufficient documentation.
I trust that the reader will find in these additions some
indication of the heartening progress of Late Antique studies
in so many directions in one single decade. The reader must
also be warned that I also, I trust, have learned much from
this progress, and should, therefore, pay especial attention to
those articles to which I refer as having modifted or criticized
my opinions on many topics, in such a way that I would
certainly treat these topics in a very different manner were I
to write on them at the present time.
Peter Brown
Department of Classics
Urliversity ofCalifomia
Berkeley
December, 1979
Vll
PART I
APPROACHES
Learning and Imagination
t
1T IS ONLY TOO EASY TO PRESENT THE STUDY OF
history in a modern university system as if it were a disci
pline for the mind alone, and so to ignore the slow and
erratic processes which go to the enrichment of the imag
ination. Yet it is precisely this imaginative curiosity about the
past that is a unique feature of western civilization. Since the
eighteenth century, we westerners have taken pleasure, and
even thought to derive wisdom, from a persistent attempt to
project ourselves into the thoughts and feelings of men and
women whose claim to our respect was precisely that they
were sensed to be profoundly different from ourselves. This
unique respect for the otherness of the past and of other so
cieties did not begin in archives; nor was it placed in the cen
tre of European culture by antiquarians. It began among
dreamers and men of well-stocked imagination. The tap
roots of the western historical tradition go deep into the rich
and far from antiseptic soil of the Romantic movement. By
the standards of a well-run History Department, the Grand
Old Men of the historical tribe were wild and woolly. Giam-
t An Inaugural Lecture delivered at Royal Holloway College on 26 May 1977. I
have appended references only to citations and to some principal authors: the themes
I touch on are dealt with mOre fully both in the anicles collected here and in my
or
Haskell Lectures at the University of Chicago, Tile Cult the Sail/IS: lIs Rise ,1IId
FUllCIiol1 in Latill Christianity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press: London: SCM
Press, 1981).
3
APPROACHES
battista Vico, author of the Scienza Nuova, abandoned law in
his youth to write poetry-and emerged a better historian
for it. 'For at this age,' he wrote, 'the mind should be given
free rein to keep the fiery spirit of youth from being numbed
and dried up, lest from too great severity of judgement,
proper to maturity but too early acquired, they should later
scarcely dare to attempt anything.'
1
In the middle of an exacting history course, it takes a
high degree of moral courage to resist one's own conscience:
to take time off; to let the imagination run; to give serious
attention to reading books that widen our sympathies, that
train us to imagine with greater precision what it is like to be
human in situations very different from our own.
It is essential to take that risk. For a history course to be
content to turn out well-trained minds when it could also
encourage widened hearts and deeper sympathies would be a
mutilation of the intellectual inheritance of our own disci
pline. It would lead to the inhibition, in our own culture, of
an element of imaginative curiosity about others whose re
moval may be more deleterious than we would like to think
to the subtle and ever-precarious ecology on which a liberal
western tradition of respect for others is based.
In warm and lucid pages, my teacher, Arnaldo Momigli
ano, a man who can both represent and embrace in his own
writings the full richness of the western tradition of historical
learning, has warned us ever more frequently that the grip of
the study of history on the face of a great culture can be a
mere finger-hold. Greeks, Romans and Jews slid with dis
quieting ease from the frustrations of the study of the past to
take their rest in the eternal verities of science and religion.
They readily preferred what was, or could claim to be, a'dis
cipline for the mind', abstract, rigorous and certain, to a
study of ambiguous status that involved the clash of critical
opinion on issues that intimately affected their estimate of
I. The Autobiography ofGiambattista Vico, trans. M. H. Fisch and T. G. Bergin
(lthaca, 1944), p. 118.
4
LEARNING AND IMAGINATION
their fellows, that exposed them to the strains of travel and
political experience, and that might even commit the articu
late and intelligent man to the tiresome labour of learning
foreign languages.2
Pro nobis fabula narratur. If the capacity for imaginative
curiosity is part of our handhold on the culture of our age,
then it becomes all the more urgent to insist that we train this
imagination; that we ask ourselves whether the imaginative
models that we bring to the study of history are suffICiently
precise and differentiated, whether they embrace enough of
what we sense to be what it is to be human, to enable us to
understand and to communicate to others the sheer challenge
of the past.
As an historian of Late Antiquity, I have been brought up
against this issue in an abrupt form. I have been forced to
understand nothing less than the dynamics of a religious rev
olution. Faced by such a challenge, the historian has to take
time off for a moment: he has to allow his imagination to be
chastened and refined. He has to examine the imaginative
models, handed down to him from within his own tradition
of learning, that affect his views on a subject as profound as
the nature and workings of the religious sentiment in society.
What I had wished to understand is an aspect of the re
ligious revolution of Late Antiquity that has left a permanent
mark on the life, even on the landscape, of western Europe
the rise of the cult of saints and of their relics. What I found
was that interpretation of this phenomenon is a cross-roads at
which the conflicting imaginative models that we bring to the
understanding of Late Antiquity as a whole can be seen to
converge.
Let me begin by sketching out the phenomenon, as it
appears in its most concrete form: the genius of Late Antique
men lay in their ability to map out, to localize and to render
magnificently palpable by every device of art, ceremonial.
2. See, most recently, A. D. Momigliano, Alit'lI Wisdom: Tilt' Limits t~" Hd
lenisatioll (Cambridge, 1975)·
5