Through the Eye of a Needle: Wealth, the Fall of Rome, and the Making of Christianity in the West 350–550 AD by Peter Brown (review)

About Peter Brown’s Augustine of Hippo (1967), I can say what I can say about no other work of history from the second half of the twentieth century. I remember exactly where I was sitting when I first read it. And I think I am not the only historian of my generation for whom it came as a revelation, not only for its breadth of learning but above all for its proof that scholarly writing can be both clear and complex, that it can make the past seem (as it must seem) both contemporary and utterly strange. To assert that this Peter Brown is still powerfully in evidence in Through the Eye of a Needle, most of which builds its picture through close reading of the texts of the writers of late antiquity, is not a complaint against but rather a tribute to the fact that great historians, however much what they offer may expand and grow ever more complicated as their range increases, do not fundamentally change.

Brown’s study of attitudes toward wealth in the Latin West between 350 and 550 refutes received wisdom about how changing patterns of philanthropy weakened the staying power of the Roman empire and undercut Jesus’s message in the Christian church. Against an overview of social history informed by vast reading in recent research, always acknowledged with his characteristic generosity, Brown shows that the transfer of wealth from civic institutions to the churches was a result not simply of economic and social facts or Christian preaching but also of changes in the hopes and fears, the values and opportunities, of people of middling status. Such attitudes have resonance in modern America and yet cannot be understood by modern analogies.

Many recent reviewers have applauded Brown’s book as a masterpiece and attempted to summarize his vision of the late antique world and the growth of the Christian concept of “treasure in heaven.” A little review is not the place to do this again. Let me rather attempt to capture what it is about Brown’s way of writing history that makes it both rare and astonishing. Garry Wills has pointed to Brown’s sometimes flamboyant use of metaphor but this is not the heart of Brown’s power. Many historians use metaphors, analogies, and comparisons. What Brown does is to address the reader directly and take him or her through a text or inscription in a manner we might paraphrase thus: “Read the passage. Now you might think it says X, and it does; but X has to be understood against a long tradition that means it is not the X you think it is. Yet you should not dismiss your original reading. Both readings are important not so much because of what X says as because of why, at that particular moment, it was said; and to understand that you have to understand its world.” This is a partly intuitive, partly contrarian way of moving through evidence that leaves the past intact in its foreignness yet opens it up to contemporary understanding without the obfuscation of jargon, the didacticism of moralizing parallels, or the de haut en bas tone of the scholar who knows more than the reader does. It is both masterful and friendly. Hence Through the Eye of a Needle, an important revisionary account for scholars of the ancient world, should also be read by a general public and by beginning undergraduates as an example of the humanity, the generosity, and the clarity of scholarship at its best.