Treasure in Heaven: The Holy Poor in Early Christianity by Peter Brown (review)

This book presents the James W. Richard Lectures, which Peter Brown delivered at the University of Virginia in 2012. In recent books, Brown has explored themes of wealth, poverty, and charity in Christian communities in late antiquity and the early Middle Ages. This time, the “poor” that Brown studies are not the involuntary or working poor but “the holy poor,” persons who willingly abandoned normal means of self-support for religious reasons and thus relied on others for their material well-being. Recognition of, and charity to, the holy poor raised questions about labor and the nature of the Christian community, issues about which Christians did not always agree. The New Testament had left them conflicting messages. “Give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven,” Jesus exhorted (Matthew 19:21). Yet Paul commanded, “Anyone unwilling to work should not eat” (2 Thessalonians 3:10), while also suggesting that some, so to speak, professional Christians deserved financial support: “If we have sown spiritual good among you, is it too much if we reap your material benefits?” (1 Corinthians 9:11). This complicated legacy of the first century (Chapter 1) laid the basis for the growth of a church-supported class of bishops and teachers during the second and third centuries, which, rising on the basis of religious expertise, provoked the suspicion of traditional elites (Chapter 2).

Brown traces the emergence of two basic approaches to the holy poor among Christians of the fourth and fifth centuries. On the one hand, Christian sources from Syria depicted labor as a burdensome penalty for the fall of Adam and Eve: Ascetics who lived like angels, free from earthly labor, represented the transcendence to which all Christians aspired (Chapter 4). The Manichaean division between the ascetic Elect and their supportive Hearers represented a stark version of this two-tiered community model (Chapter 3). On the other hand, literary sources constructed an ideal image of the Egyptian monk as a self-supporting laborer who worked with his hands (Chapter 5). This self-sufficiency suggested solidarity between the monk and fellow human beings who must work for their food; it also enabled lay donations to monks seemingly above being bought (Chapter 6). If we widen our view to include Buddhist and Manichaean communities farther to the east, the clash of these Egyptian and Syrian models becomes “the western end of a debate on wealth, labor, and monks that was as wide as Asia itself” (116).

Brown has been a pioneer in the interdisciplinary study of late antiquity, drawing especially on sociology and anthropology. In these chapters, which retain the brevity and conversational style of the original lectures, his interdisciplinary sophistication remains primarily implicit (except in his discussion of the sociology of Buddhism [xii], and of the irrelevance of Max Weber’s distinction between charismatic and bureaucratic authority [104, 109–110]). Instead, readers profit from an innovative historian telling a fascinating story with clarity, grace, and insight.