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)

Many of Peter Brown’s recent volumes have been slender affairs of published three-part lectures. At more than 750 pages, this volume is anything but slight. It is a magisterial examination of the distinctly varied regional impacts of wealth on Christianity in the West in late antiquity through the writings of a varied group of authors. At its heart the book investigates how the transformation of the seemingly radical call of Jesus to the rich to sell all and give to the poor into a more moderate almsgiving that led to the creation of wealthy churches gives too much emphasis to the heroic renunciation of the few to the neglect of the more mundane, but nonetheless imaginative, acts of charity common among a wider population within both Christian and non-Christian societies. Even the very passage of Scripture chosen for the title (Mark 10.25; Matt 19.24; Luke 18.25) indicates that this will be a volume about the rich rather than about asceticism or almsgiving.

As usual with this author there is a sweeping panorama and an unbelievably vast array of resources evaluated as only a scholar who has reflected on late antiquity for decades can produce, with two hundred pages of notes and bibliography. In the opening chapter Brown presents his reader, through a deft summary of shifting scholarship devoted both to literature and archaeology, the sliding-scale (rather than binary) nature of Roman wealth and the intimate connection between wealth and power. Brown shows himself to be the champion of middle-class Christians in the next chapter, when he identifies Christian leadership of the fourth century as belonging here. In the third chapter, Brown presents his familiar argument: that wealthy non-Christians had been accustomed to civic endowment for the benefit of fellow citizens. Yet, when he speaks of citizen entitlements, does he mean they were restricted to citizens of a particular town or citizens of the empire as a whole? Who after Caracalla were the poor or the immigrants who were not citizens? Some clarity here would be welcome, especially since this distinction he makes between citizens (plebs) and the poor forms a backbone to the entire work. From here Brown considers the alternative to civic benefaction—the Christian call to give not just to citizens but also to the poor—and the way in which the notion of poor was transformed from beggars to the Old Testament notion of those seeking justice. A few chapters on Symmachus illustrate the old understanding and some on Ambrose the new.

Then, not unsurprisingly, attention turns to Augustine. We follow his early life, particularly his social standing and the role wealth and poverty played in the monastic community he formed around him. The point that is driven home is that the victory of the private over the common good was the root of all sin. Attention then shifts to Paulinus of Nola and his super-wealthy background in Gaul (in the context of Priscillianism), and a contrast is made with Ausonius, who viewed wealth within a classical perspective. What is interesting in Brown’s portrayal of Paulinus is the notion that his asceticism was about the avoidance of splendor, except in the lavishness he fixed on the shrine for Felix in Nola as a way of acquiring treasure in heaven.

When attention is turned to Rome itself, we see Damasus and his outreach to the sub-elite, Ambrosiaster and his concern to maintain the inclusive status quo in Roman Christian society, Jerome and his call for an inward-looking urban monasticism (and at the same time the transfer of money to monasteries in the East and the resentment this caused to cash-strapped local clergy inspired by the anti-ascetical Vigilantius and Jovinian), and the challenges presented by money for the...