The Ransom of the Soul: Afterlife and Wealth in Early Western Christianity by Peter Brown (review)

In his newest book Peter Brown, Philip and Beaulah Rollins Professor of History, Emeritus, of Princeton University, tackles the topics of afterlife and wealth in early Christian Europe from 200-700 ce. He offers readers insight into “the formation of Christian views of the afterlife in terms of a perpetual argument among Christians themselves” (x). By eschewing a “flat and tensionless” master narrative he illustrates “how arguments about wealth and poverty in Christianity are not timeless matters.” Rather, they reflect “specific, concrete circumstances of the Christian communities of the Latin West in differing regions and at different times” (xi).

Brown finds changing views of the afterlife, most notably the beginnings of the notion of purgatory, reflect “the cultural, religious, and social changes that characterized the transition from late antiquity to the early Middle Ages” (xii). He places the development of destinies of individual souls and the role of wealth in linking the souls of dead to the living against the backdrop of societal changes in Africa, Rome, Gaul, and Ireland. In charting this history while drawing upon the work of anthropologists, Brown illustrates how “the representation of the other world current in the Christian West had come to look very different from that of its neighbors: Eastern Christian, Jewish, and Muslim” (24).

This account begins by contrasting a medical report on the other world for a dying friend by Julian of Toledo, 688 ad, with tracts on mortality and martyrdom by Cyprian, bishop of Carthage from 248 to 258 ad. This disparity over four centuries illustrates a “growing attention to the destinies of individual souls in terms of the precise admixture of their sins and merits” (16). He traces the move “from an early Christianity where the unique deaths of the martyrs and the gigantic tremor of the Resurrection held the center of attention to a world where (to adopt a modern axiom) it took all sorts to make a Christian other world” (16). This focus on the individual fate of souls opened up the concern for what the living might do for the dead.

Money came to speak powerfully in the churches of Western Europe as a means of linking the living to the dead. By the latter period under consideration those with financial means “sought to protect, nourish, and eventually bring home to heaven their own souls and the souls of the deceased” (20). Wealth became the ransom of the soul in an other world imagined with tripartite divisions between heaven, purgatory, and hell. In this transition, taking place slowly and differentially across space, even “the image of God Himself changed. God became, as it were, the ‘debt manager’ of the believer. He could set the terms for the repayment of the debts of sin. Better yet, He could remit those debts — canceling the arrears of a lifetime in a splendid moment of forgiveness” (97). In this interlinking of mundane and other worlds perpetual giving became the counterpart to perpetual sin as monasteries, regular confessions, and penance came to characterize Western Christianity.

This fascinating history of the ransom of the soul should be of interest to scholars of religion, economics, anthropology, and history alike. Just as the account began with a contrast between the perspectives of two bishops separated by four centuries, it ends with a contrast between carved epitaphs. Earlier markers contained “florid memorial inscriptions that insisted that the dead were as securely lodged in a star-filled heaven as any of the Worthies of pagan Rome had been.” Yet, by the seventh century the living who had praised the dead are replaced by inscriptions on tombstones through which “we begin to hear the dead themselves asking for the prayers of the living” (210). Peter Brown has given us yet another intriguing account of the period during which Rome fell and the major monotheistic faiths began to take their modern forms.