The great English philosopher of history R.G. Collingwood once remarked that “historical thought is a river into which none can step twice—even a single historian, working at a single subject for a certain length of time, finds when he tries to reopen an old question that the question has changed.” It is not only that the evidentiary base has changed—sometimes due to new discoveries, sometimes to changing methods—but that the historian has changed in the intervening years. According to Collingwood, interpreting historical evidence is a task to which we must bring everything we know—historical, metaphysical, mathematical, philosophical—as well as our habits and possessions of every kind, none of which are unchanging. In this self-reflective activity in which the history of history arises, we might learn something not only about the practice of the discipline but also about what it means to think historically.
Thinking historically, however, is not easily distinguished from other forms of ratiocination. Indeed, Collingwood compares the historian’s work to that of the novelist: Both are works of imagination. The difference between the novel and the work of history for Collingwood is found in the greater complexity of the historian’s task: Whereas the novelist has a single task of constructing a coherent picture, one that makes sense within its own world, the historian must localize a picture in space and time, specify its relation to what might in any given context count as “evidence,” and connect that picture, in some way, with other accounts of the world. It is a monumentally difficult task when done well.
But it is also a manifestly personal task. We might say that the historian’s task is driven by what worries the historian most persistently. The questions of the field, or even of our mentors and heroes, can get us only so far—for every historian is driven by perplexities, large or small, that may be shared or even provide a basis for community, but that can never be fully resolved by another. It is in this way that the historian is our most modern of all scholars, through the act of single authorship recovering lost worlds, breathing life into them, and addressing those very problems that drove the writing in the first place. In keeping with its modern spirit, the field of history is propelled forward by its most ambitious practitioners, those who push beyond the normal risks entailed in speaking coherently about worlds distant from our own toward claims about how they have shaped and are shaping our world.
There is, in this respect, no greater name than the eighteenth-century historian Edward Gibbon, whose monumental Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire deserves its reputation as the paradigm of grand history. The detail and surprising nuance with which Gibbon handles, for example, the rise of Islam, is breathtaking at times. But he also provides something like an ideal of that extinct creature, the universal historian, who confidently compares diverse and dispersed societies, seeing in them similar patterns of growth and decay. We are now better informed than Gibbon on many subjects, including Islam’s emergence from the existing cultural, social, and political milieus of the Middle East and how it went on to transform those spaces. But we can only stand in awe of such a magisterial account of the interrelations of the ideas and societies of a large and scattered empire.
Today, Gibbon has no greater admirer, nor more perceptive critic, than Peter Brown, who is rightly described as our age’s preeminent historian. Brown has called Gibbon a “philosophical historian.” For many historians, this might be an aspersion, but for Brown it was an acknowledgment that imagination can add to erudition when it is given the chance to stretch its legs and stride across the world as Gibbon’s Decline and Fall had done.
I’ve often heard it claimed that Brown’s ambition was to replace Gibbon’s Decline and Fall with an account that would push beyond the two-tiered model of elite cultured savants and the vulgar masses (an imaginative model that Brown rightly acknowledges was informed by David Hume’s account of religion). In its place, Brown would raise the late antique world during which the vestments of new institutions and their visions of the good were draped over the solid-wood furniture of the Roman imperial order. In this period, we meet some of the more perplexing figures from the Mediterranean world and its fringes, whose pursuit of identity in the divine, often within rigid and intentionally homogenizing institutions, found expression in certain wild personalities: Rome’s first Christian emperor, Constantine the Great; Pope Gregory I, called “the Great” in tribute to his strengths as a moral and administrative leader; Mani, founder of a world religion, Manichaeanism; Symeon the Stylite, whose choice to live atop a pillar in the Syrian desert did not prevent him from wielding political power; Ambrose, early Christian intellectual and bishop of Milan, who brought a Roman emperor to heel; and Boethius, the philosopher-turned-failed-civil servant best known for writing The Consolation of Philosophy. Brown has brought to life the characters and inescapable ambiguities of late antique society and its religious and philosophical ideas. He has not done so alone, but he was the chief protagonist in what arguably became the late twentieth century’s most exciting field of history. Indeed, reading Brown can feel like reading a novel.
Peter Brown’s memoir Journeys of the Mind offers us glimpses, often in short episodes, of the social and institutional settings from which the academic field of late antiquity emerged. It is also a window into the process whereby Brown became a historian himself, or, rather, the events, conversations, books, and travels through which he discovered that he could be nothing other than a historian. It is an account, not unlike Augustine’s Confessions, of a conversion in retrospect. With front and end matter, the book runs to more than seven hundred pages between its covers.
It begins in a leisurely way, with Brown’s family history in Ireland. With his regional, religious, family, and educational background, Brown offers, in his words, “a necessary counterweight to [the] one-dimensional approach” commonly found in “brisk historiographical surveys that presented scholars purely as products of academe.” We find Brown crediting experiences from his family’s history with his sense of the “magnetic draw of a worldwide empire in its glory days,” as well as “what it was like to face the end of empire on the ground.”
The interpenetration of personal experience and scholarly advance appears on nearly every page. He emphasizes encounters with his near contemporaries, through both their books and their conversation—for instance, the pivotal experience of lazily reading Henri-Irénée Marrou’s Saint Augustin et la fin de la culture antique while floating in a Thames River punt past the Oxford colleges, or chatting with the anthropologist Mary Douglas, whom he credits with helping him overcome the two-tiered model of Hume and Gibbon that seemed, to the Irish Protestant Brown, to have infected the intellectual atmosphere of postwar Oxford. Douglas urged Brown to see “religion and society as if they were the two faces of the same social structure.” Religion was, in this perspective, the language that gave expression to society’s stresses and strains. While this might not seem like an earth-shattering insight today, it is important to recognize how hard won was this vantage point. History at Oxford was then, above all, an account of high politics, especially of England. In many respects, Brown’s account is most moving in the ways he subtly, kindly, yet insistently pushed against the scholarly consensus of the time.
The spirit of Brown’s own memoirs is akin to that which infused his best-known and most widely read work, his biography of Augustine of Hippo. Like Augustine’s confreres, Brown’s influences, colleagues, and collaborators come to life in the worlds his pen inscribes. Brown’s accounts, even his magisterial biography of Augustine, have never been unquestioned or even universally accepted, but his power to frame the conversation, to bring it to life, is nearly irresistible.
The hinge on which Brown’s memoir turns is his slim volume The World of Late Antiquity. Published in 1971, it challenged scholarly conventions that neatly divided the ancient and medieval worlds. Filled with illustrations, The World of Late Antiquity visualized the transformations that were, in fits and starts, unfolding between 200 and 800 AD. It is often overlooked, but here is where Brown was craftiest in his subterfuge against Gibbon. He did not sit down to write six volumes to match Gibbon’s work. Rather, he offered readers judicious selections from which he constructed a compelling narrative of continuity and change to replace decline and fall. In this way, he was able to press his message precisely where Gibbon’s lingered the most persistently: among the general learned public.
From this point in the narrative, in the early 1970s, Journeys of the Mind quickens its pace. Brown begins a life of peregrination, from Oxford to relatively short stints as professor of history at Royal Holloway College and the University of California, Berkeley, before settling at Princeton, where he remains today as an emeritus professor of history. The encounters with books, people, lands, and libraries widen out as Brown’s own late antique frame widens, eventually stretching from the western shores of Europe and the British Isles to the mountains and desertscapes of Persia and Afghanistan.
Two episodes of decidedly different casts stand out. First, Brown details in vivid language his experiences of traveling through Iran in the years before Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s 1978–79 revolution transformed a sophisticated and beautiful culture into the violent theocracy we know today. Second, Brown recounts his somewhat famous encounters with Michel Foucault. In some respects, these were also a new departure, one that perhaps left just as much behind as it discovered. If only we had Brown’s envisioned work on the Sassanian Empire, which stood as the global counterweight to Byzantium.
Although Brown was already moving toward reflections on the body and sexuality, Foucault’s provocations in his first volume of The History of Sexuality (1976) gave him a final, cultural impetus for doing so. It is fascinating to read Brown’s account of their conversations, and to appreciate his evident respect for Foucault, but this is perhaps one of the more disappointing episodes in Journeys of the Mind. The publication of Brown’s The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity in 1988 occurred at precisely the right time, when the baby boomers’ sexual revolution had dissipated and the realities of establishing a career, raising children, and fretting about sexual mores became cultural touchstones. Brown wanted to understand the relevance of ancient Christian reflections on sexual renunciation to modern times. But he demurred from spelling this out completely, admitting that “I was neither an activist nor a theologian.” Foucault, by contrast, was perhaps both an activist and a theologian, if by that we mean someone with a normative vision of how individuals and communities might find transcendent meaning in this world.
In his inaugural lecture as professor of history at Royal Holloway College, Brown pressed the case for the necessity of imagination in the historical craft. The historian must water his imagination from those springs of culture around him while also learning to examine the imaginative models handed down within his own traditions of learning. Is there any better description of what happens in the process of conversion? One might wish to hear Brown reflect not only on to what he had converted in his new late antique paradigm, but also on for what end. In other words, what is the project that sustains the converted life? We have an idea of what Gibbon wanted—and largely achieved—in narrating a modernity that could relegate doctrinal and institutional religion to the dusty corners of society. It is not clear that Brown precisely wants the reverse, but what is his normative vision?
The most interesting thread that runs through Journeys of the Mind—from Brown’s childhood in Ireland, where he encountered what he calls the “hard edges of religion,” to his mature years at Princeton, where the soft edges of academic tomes predominate—is not the scholarly toppling of Gibbon’s two-tiered imaginative model, though this is of great significance. Rather, it is the way in which Brown kept a steady eye on the broader reading public. Brown’s late antiquity was not simply for other historians—it was also to be appreciated, felt in the rooms and exhibits of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
We often trace Brown’s genealogy from Marrou to Douglas and Foucault. This is what resonates with our scholarly pretensions. But Brown is not a pretentious author. The most intriguing lineage is one that, yes, begins with Gibbon: not Gibbon the master of historical evidence, but Gibbon the master of historical narrative. And it is this which is enlivened by Brown’s brief encounters with C.S. Lewis. Brown suggests, in a telling aside, that Lewis’s contribution was one of translating Christian doctrine into a language that unscholarly people would attend to and understand. “I loved him for it,” Brown concludes. Gibbon and Lewis are linked by their sense that to understand societies and their historical literatures is a normative or, as Collingwood would have it, a criteriological endeavor. To understand past agents historically is not only to understand the social, political, and environmental pressure chambers in which they acted, but also to appreciate something of the conceptual connections they made in those contexts. By doing so, both Gibbon and Lewis stepped onto normative terrain themselves.
Journeys of the Mind is not a complete autobiography, or even an incomplete one. It obscures and sidelines much that makes us human—those messy and difficult personal relationships that keep you up at night. The task of discovering Brown the man will probably fall to another historian. It will likely be in the discovery of the more intimate domains of Brown’s life that we will learn something more about how he, too, brought normativity to bear on the work of history, and in that way became a historian we shall remember alongside Gibbon. But by then, Brown’s life will no doubt be a much different river into which one will be stepping. This is not to discount the gift he has left us. Journeys of the Mind is a fresh and vivid account of how scholarship imbued with genuinely public concerns and written for the learned public more broadly can transform the most rarefied, and discipline-specific, conversations.