Peter Brown’s autobiography, Journeys of the Mind, has been comprehensively and enthusiastically reviewed in the broadsheets and quality weeklies, which have covered its personal and familial content, remarked on a variety of omissions, and canvassed its idiosyncracies. For readers of this journal, who number among them Brown’s many students and still more recipients of his kindness and support, one can essay a closer look at the more purely intellectual biography outlined in the book—or rather, there being no such thing as purely intellectual biography, the parts of it that most directly address intellectual and scholarly developments.
Journeys of the Mind runs from Brown’s childhood and schooldays in the 1940s and early 1950s until 1987: thus more than half of his life but less than half of an academic career that carried him through twenty years at Oxford to forty and counting at Princeton, via briefer appointments at Royal Holloway and UC Berkeley. While some may find that disappointing, it makes a good deal of sense: like Tacitus or Ammianus declining to write on living emperors, Brown can refrain from passing judgement, whether by commission or omission, on more recent generations, the scholarly children and grandchildren who currently populate the academy. Indeed, the book manages its nihil nisi bonum of scholars both living and dead so assiduously that one is brought up short by the single exception that proves the rule (Joan Hussey, his predecessor at Royal Holloway). Readers already familiar with Brown’s authorial voice, always conversational and for decades resolutely mid-Atlantic in its linguistic choices, will be struck by how Irish some of his phrasing here sounds—one of many things that distinguish it from that other scintillating memoir of an Irish scholar at Oxford, E.R. Dodds’ Missing Persons. But on to the intellectual biography.
The World of Late Antiquity (1971) may have invented the period and field as we now know it, as something far bigger than Bas-Empire/Later Roman Empire. More significant than that revolution was Brown’s demonstration, beginning with Augustine of Hippo (1967) and never since flagging, that religion matters, not so much as it is propounded and explained by the theologians and exegetes, but as it is lived and felt by contemporaries, in whatever register and with whatever degree of fervor. He recalls being struck, and confused, by the English indifference to religion that he encountered at both Shrewsbury School and New College, Oxford, and attributes his own consciousness of religion’s importance to a Dublin childhood where Protestant and Catholic existed in separate, parallel worlds. Historicizing that early consciousness involved a set of formative influences that may take the reader by surprise. Christopher Hill’s Lenin and the Russian Revolution, part of Hodder and Stoughton’s wonderful mid-century Teach Yourself History Library, seems to have given Brown the aversion to political, intellectual, and institutional history stripped of its social context that has characterized all of his work. Huizinga’s Waning of the Middle Ages (in the old, more enjoyable Hopman translation) gave him a feel for historical spectacle, but also for historical difference, the alienness of the past, the chasm that separates us from generations long gone. T.E. Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom, which he read and re-read when at home, surely informed his later fascination with the world of Islam every bit as much as did his childhood experience of the Sudan, where his father worked.
To read about Brown’s first encounters with a variety of classic histories is to be struck by how some—Runciman’s History of the Crusades, for instance—retain their power to excite and enthrall, while others have aged into time capsules: Rostovtzeff’s Social and Economic History of the Roman World was barely thirty years old when Brown first read it but now, approaching its centenary, feels like a fascinating relic. He is disobliging about Kantorowicz’s Frederick II, approving of Georg Ostrogorsky on Byzantium and Walter Ullmann on the papacy. At Oxford, he was able to hear lectures that went on to become such eye-opening books as Steven Runciman’s Eastern Schism and Dmitri Obolensky’s Byzantine Commonwealth. An undergraduate Special Subject on the Age of Augustine introduced him to several masterworks, Piganiol’s L’empire chrétien, Seeck’s Geschichte des Untergangs der antiken Welt, and Mazzarino’s Stilicone: La crisi imperiali dopo Teodosio, thanks to the last of which “life and warmth flooded back into the fourth century.” We have now lived so long with Brown’s own rich vision of late antiquity that it comes as a surprise to see him attribute its germ to this early absorption of Mazzarino. It was also in this period that Brown first discovered two works with which he was long in fruitful dialogue: W.H.C. Frend’s Donatist Church and H.-I. Marrou’s Saint Augustin et la fin de la culture antique with its retractatio of 1949. Brown’s description of the thrill of reading them is among the finest passages here and should send the reader back to both: they stand up well to re-reading in light of his discussion here, Marrou in particular revealed as a truly prescient intellect.
Succeeding in the All Souls Fellowship examination, Brown embarked into what he calls the “educational vacuum” of postgraduate research, so very different from the weekly supervision and make-or-break examination of his undergraduate years, and equally different from the modern experience of graduate cohorts and intensive seminars. He introduces us to his early experience of his graduate supervisor, Arnaldo Momigliano, but saves a rich and moving encomium to him for the very end of the memoir. Brown also gives us an important picture of the impact of A.H.M. Jones on late Roman studies—“he had unfrozen the image of the later Roman empire.” And when he remarks, correctly, that the “views of Santo Mazzarino and Jones have entered so deeply into the bloodstream of late Roman studies that we tend to forget their startling novelty at this time,” we might well repurpose it for his own works of the 1970s and 1980s.
The long section of the book that takes us through the writing of Augustine of Hippo will be somewhat more familiar to anyone who has read the long epilogue to that book’s second edition (2000), though it is gratifying to see Tillemont’s Mémoires Écclésiastiques given credit in their own right and not just a sourcebook for Gibbon. What also comes out more clearly here than ever before is the importance of the fourth international Oxford Patristics Conference of September 1963. In our current world, where international conferences have become routine and attendance at them obligatory for the budding scholar, one has to struggle to imagine when it “was a major and infrequent event” to be able “to meet the scholarly elite of Europe gathered in one place.” Brown evokes the intellectual ferment of a really successful conference quite splendidly—and reminds one of how rarely the stars align to make such successes possible. There is a long section on the period in the late 1960s during which Brown discovered anthropology and other theoretical approaches to human societies, not least in the work of E.E. Evans-Pritchard and Mary Douglas, while it is also here that the name-checking begins to read like a scholarly who’s who of the last three decades of the twentieth century.
Far less familiar are the chapters, about a hundred pages in all, that detail Brown’s trips to Iran in 1973, Iran and Afghanistan in 1976, as well as a later trip to Cairo. There is some inevitable feel of the travelogue in them, as he himself confesses, but they also bring home the fact that activity needn’t lead to publication to be important, personally and intellectually. Writing The World of Late Antiquity (1971) was one of the things that led Brown to develop his fascination with Islam, and also his sense of a much bigger world beyond the Graeco-Roman Mediterranean: that meant Persia, and especially the Persia of the Sasanian dynasty, which took in large parts of modern Afghanistan and smaller bits of (then) Soviet Central Asia. The evocations of landscape here forcefully remind one of Brown’s eye for the telling detail. They likewise underscore something one can also learn from ancient authors like Ammianus: one really does write more effectively about sites one has seen and walked over than those one has only read about or seen depicted. Brown lets us feel what it was like for him to grasp the sheer scale of the Iranian landscape or to realize that the rock-cut monuments to Persian kings, which most of us have only seen in photos, are “only the markers of sites—of privileged ecological niches in a harsh land” or, as he had put in a letter written at the time about Bisotun, there was “nothing grandiose about the inscription. It is a signet stamp carefully impressed on the irreducible mass of rock.” Brown did not go on to write very much about the Persian world that so moved him (several of his students have), not least because the Iranian Revolution made it impossible to revisit the sites of his revelations. It is nevertheless very clear that these travels expanded his imaginative horizons in ways that suffuse all his many books that were still to come.
The memoir’s last major sections take us from Royal Holloway, to Berkeley, and then to Princeton, where a MacArthur Fellowship allows Brown to devote himself to the research that would become The Body and Society in Late Antiquity. That book appeared in 1988, the year after he brings the formal narrative of his autobiography to its conclusion, though he does find space for a quick dash through the subsequent writings, including illuminating sections on the genesis of that other masterpiece, Power and Persuasion in Late Antiquity. As engaging as anything that comes before them, these chapters are also less revelatory, simply because Brown’s reading and thinking is now more purposive, less serendipitous—the natural effect of experience and a couple of decades in the business of scholarship.
One of the book’s treats is the way insights lurk in what seem like asides: the Colonel Lockhart who read to the boys at Aravon School from Jim Corbett’s Man-eaters of Kumaon surely fired some of Brown’s love for the gripping anecdote and his deft touch with landscape. Hilda Prescott’s Man on a Donkey (1952), read in Switzerland on his gap year, is another surprise, but its evocation of the Pilgrimage of Grace does indeed resonate in the intensity of Brown’s later descriptions of late ancient worship. The passing account of drinking Rabelais’ wine of Touraine with the Pères Augustiniens reminds us that inspiration comes from colloquies of the like-minded just as surely as it does from books. And there are also the might-have-beens: Brown might have worked on his Latin with Ludwig Bieler before leaving Ireland for Oxford, save that “Bieler’s fees were too high for my father and the bus journey to where he lived too complicated.” As in every career, chance and happenstance matter for better and for worse.
By the end of its seven hundred pages, every reader will have found something in Journeys of the Mind to amuse, stimulate, or enhance their understanding. Certainly, there will be one or two classic authors to whom one is prompted to return with new eyes. Most of us will also come away unpleasantly aware of our own imaginative and linguistic inadequacies, as well as a lack of stamina: few indeed would choose to endure a five-hundred mile bus journey from Kabul to Herat while “light-headed with Imodium.” The fact that Peter Brown did so is one small part of the reason his own work has inspired others as much as the titans he credits here had once inspired him.