Perhaps one of the most famous of all panegyrics ever composed to the consolations of an intellectual vocation is that written during his time of unsought retirement by the great Italian Renaissance patriot and political theorist Niccolò Machiavelli (1469-1527).
In the evening, I return to my house, and go into my study. At the door I take off the clothes I have worn all day, mud spotted and dirty, and put on regal and courtly garments. Thus appropriately clothed, I enter into the ancient courts of ancient men, where, being lovingly received, I feed on that food which alone is mine, and which I was born for; I am not ashamed to speak with them and to ask the reasons for their actions, and they courteously answer me. For four hours I feel no boredom and forget every worry; I do not fear poverty and death does not terrify me. I give myself completely over to the ancients.
In my own unsought retirement, I too at times have found a semblance of consolation in Machiavelli’s account of intellectual aspiration and vicarious experience of participation in a great tradition of ancient courts of ancient men.
More than any musings of my own, Macchiavelli’s words really resonate that much more, of course, in an actual account of an authentic intellectual life, such as I have had the great pleasure of reading this week in Princeton’s Ralph and Beulah Rollins Professor Emeritus of History, Peter Brown’s, eloquently autobiographical Journeys of the Mind: A Life in History (Princeton U. Pr., 2023).
I first encountered Peter Brown when, as a twenty-something grad student I first read his magisterial Augustine of Hippo: A Biography (U. of California Pr., 1967). Between then and my recent re-reading of Brown’s Augustine in its second edition (2000), I also had the undiluted pleasure of working my way through Brown’s The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity (Faber and Faber, 1988), The Rise of Western Christendom: Triumph and Diversity A.D. 200-1000 (Blackwell, 1996, 2nd ed. 2003), Through the Eye of a Needle: Wealth, the Fall of Rome (Princeton U. Pr., 2012), and The Making of Christianity in the West, 350-550 (Princeton U. Pr., 2012). Of course, these represent only some of Brown’s scholarly publications, but they are perhaps many of his most famous ones and, in any case, the ones that interested me most.
Brown’s account is autobiographical, but it is less a conventional autobiography and more of an intellectual autobiography, the story of a scholarly life, a life lived in scholarly settings, engaging professionally and personally with other serious scholars and scholarly institutions, and deeply immersed in the history of late antiquity. Anyone interested in the history of late antiquity, which here includes much of the Middle Ages, or in the intellectual vocation as lived by a 20th-century academic will find much to treasure in this account.
While not a standard autobiography focused on the personal, it remains a very personal story. Surprisingly, it starts with Brown’s family history and his own childhood coming of age as a member of the Protestant minority in the 20th-century Irish Free State. He highlights « the affinities between what I picked up in the Ireland of my boyhood and the issues on which I have concentrated in the study of late antiquity » – the most obvious being a respect for the power and role of religion, something he took for granted in Ireland in a way which was not the case at Oxford when he was a student there, nor in the historical profession generally at that time. The complex vagaries of family heritage, Irish religious divisions, his father’s service abroad in Sudan, and the nature and functioning of classical education in the post-war period are fascinating stories in themselves, all of which came together to help form him into the specific scholar he would become, never forgetting who he was and where he was from.
Anyone who, like me, spent a formative part of life at the margins of the intellectual world, will be fascinated by his vivid portrait of, first, Oxford and, later, other academic institutions, scholarly adventures, and intellectual relationships. Personally I really resonated with his account of how he « developed a historical sensibility that led me, through a series of encounters with the sheer beauty of the medieval buildings and stained glass of Oxford and Shrewsbury, to a wish to study distant periods of history. » At Oxford, Brown also became acquainted with Catholicism as « the true religion of Europe » – in a manner very different from that suggested by his Irish Protestant tribal upbringing. « Whether one believed in it or not, Catholicism seemed to offer a way to a wider, richer world than did the unprepossessing Protestantism of the British Isles. » Then, as a young academic attending scholarly conferences, he « was impressed by the diversity and learning of the Catholic clergy and by the members of the Catholic religious order – monks and nuns alike. » (This was the great post-war, pre-conciliar era of ressourcement.)
Early on, he also determined to produce history that would be of interest not just to academics but to « a wide and cultivated public. » He would successfully do this throughout his life, beginning with his famous and reputation-creating work on Augustine.
At Oxford, Brown’s « Special Subject » had been Augustine, which entailed « an exciting range of topics » – alongside Augustine himself, « the end of paganism, the workings of imperial government, the crisis of the cities, and the first fateful decades of the barbarian invasions. » He read Henri-Irénée Marrou, André Piganiol, and William Frend. The latter’s treatment of Donatism opened him to his first approach to Augustine « through the unforgiving confrontation of two Christian churches, on the ground in the mean streets of the towns and villages of Roman Africa. » Over time, he learned « to hear Augustine clearly as he spoke the unfamiliar language of an ancient Christian from a millennium and a half ago. » In the process, he « claimed a place for individual subjectivity, for ideas, for culture, and for religious experience as proper objects of historical study for young and old alike in a modern university. »
Since his Augustine of Hippo: A Biography, new discoveries of hitherto unknown letters and sermons suggest to Brown a young Augustine « less naively optimistic » and an older one « by no means as glum » as Brown had originally portrayed him. Also, he « heard a more gentle voice » of a bishop who « opened himself up uncomplainingly to every duty to which his public status exposed him. » In this book, Brown several times invokes the interesting example of how Augustine in 428 (at age 74) led his congregation in attempting to break up a human trafficking ring, which flagrantly operated with powerful supporters out of the port of Hippo.
After Augustine, Brown’s intellectual interests shifted eastward. For someone who has known Brown mainly through his studies of Augustine and Christian Europe, it was fascinating to read of his intellectual (and physical) travels to Byzantium, Persia, Zoroastrianism, and the Islamic world, as well as his encounters with anthropology through Evans-Pritchard and Mary Douglas. All this happened at a time when the world was in the throes of radical change, including the unexpected (to most academics) reemergence of religion as a real political force, « like the return of a ghost. »
In time, Brown would also engage with the United States, moving his home base from Oxford to Berkeley and later Princeton. Anyone who has spent time at any of those institutions, or indeed in higher education in general, will be interested in his impressions and his favorable comparison of the American approach to the Oxford he had experienced. His move to Berkeley in the late 1970s reflected his « growing respect for the professionalism of American scholarship, and for the university systems that supported it. »
The 1980s and the influence of Michel Foucault fostered a further change in direction, as he focused on sexuality in the ancient word and the new Christian alternative valorization of sexual renunciation. Sex in the classical, pagan world had been « subservient to the needs of the ancient city » and was « engulfed in a strenuously asserted ideology of civic harmony. » In contrast, Christian virginity revealed « the the body could resist the oceanic pressures of the ancient city » and « no longer had to serve the city by marriage, intercourse, and childbearing. »
Particularly interesting is Brown’s comparison of Origen and Augustine on sexuality. For the former, « sex was somehow peripheral to the human person, » something absent before the Fall and added by God later to console humans « for their loss of immortality by the gift of children. » Augustine, Brown reminds us, thought that there would have been serene and joyful sex without the Fall, but that now humans have been punished for sin « by losing control of what had once been an original, marvelous harmony of body and soul. »
The personal is not absent from this very intellectual autobiography. His childhood family is not forgotten, and we read sensitively written descriptions of his parents’ struggles with old age and their deaths. For the most part, however, it is his personal friendships with colleagues and fellow scholars, some of whom might as well have been family, that we hear the most about. (These professional relationships reveal real friendships, resonating with emotion not unlike, it seems to me, the famous New Testament account of Paul’s parting from the Ephesian presbyters at Miletus.)
Thus the account comes somewhat full circle, ending with the death of one of his admired mentors, Arnaldo Momiglilano, in 1987, and a return to where we began with the death of his mother and his final family reminiscences in late 1980s Ireland. He specifically suggests that this book came out of that final experience.
A final « Since Then » chapter adds some final reflections on his more recent research and writing in these final years, when Princeton’s « high gravity » challenged him to widen even further his feeds of interest, and whose campus provides him « a perfect balance between teaching and research. » What a lovely way to end!
Like Machiavelli in the famous quote with which I began, Brown throughout his life regularly « put on regal and courtly garments » – the regal and courtly garments of an intellectual and scholarly vocation – a fine, well schooled mind, a copious command of other languages, the patience required for research and writing, a studious temperament, and a curiosity about other times and places that challenge rather than relocate or reinforce our own.
