SOCleTlj A.NOThe · .. ... ~..... ... .... · . · . LATe IN ANTlqU1Tlj PETER BROWN UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS BERKELEY & LOS ANGELES University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California © 1982 by The Regents of the University of California Printed in the United States of America 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Brown, Peter Robert Lamont. Society and the holy in late antiquity. Includes index. I. Rome-Religion-Collected works. 2. Rome-Histor -284-476-Collected works. 3. Church history-Primi tive and early church, ca. 30-600-Collected works. I. Title. BL805·B74 1981 270.2 80-39862 ISBN 0-520-04305-7 CONTENTS Preface vii PART I APPROACHES Learning and lmagination 3 (Inaugural Lecture, Royal Holloway College, 1977) Gibbon's Views on Culture and Society in the Fifth and Sixth Centuries 22 (Dae da lus cv tl9761 : 73-88; Edwar d GI.b bon and the Dech.n e an d Fall of the Roman Empire, 1977, pp. 37-52) In Gibbon's Shade 49 (New York Review of Books xxm (19761: 14-18) 63 Mohammed and Charlemagne by Henri Pirenne (Daedallls cm t19741: 25-31) PART 11 SOClETY AND THE HOLY The Last Pagan Emperor: Robert Browning's The Emperor Julian 83 (Times Literary Supplement, 8 April 1977. pp. 425-26) v CONTENTS The Rise and Function of the Holy Man in Late Antiquity 103 (Joumal of Roman Studies LXI [1971]: 80-101) Town, Village and Holy Man: The Case of Syria 153 a (Assimilation et resistance la culture greco-romaine dans le monde ancien, 1976, pp. 213-20) Eastern and Western Christendom in Late Antiquity: A Parting of the Ways 166 (The Orthodox Churches and the West, 1976, pp. 1-24) The View from the Precipice 196 (New York Review oJBooks XXI [19741: 3-5) Artifices of Eternity 207 (written with Sabine MacCormack, New York Review oJBooks XXII [19751: 19-22) Relics and Social Status in the Age of Gregory of Tours 222 (The Stenton Lecture, 1976; University of Reading, 1977) A Dark Age Crisis: Aspects of the Iconoclastic Controversy 251 (English Historical'Review LXXXVIII [19731: 1-34) Society and the Supernatural: A Medieval Change 302 (Daedalus CIV [19751: 133-51) Index 333 PREFACE I have brought together these articles, the fruit of a dec ade of work since the appearance of my Religion and Society in the Age of Saint Augustine, in the hope that to have them col lected in one volume would be both convenient and even, perhaps, instructive to the reader. I have, therefore, added between square brackets those works which have since be come available to me, that appear to me to add to the argu ment of those articles which already carried footnotes; and I have added some footnotes, in much the same spirit, to arti cles and reviews which either appeared without footnotes or which appear to me now to carry insufficient documentation. I trust that the reader will find in these additions some indication of the heartening progress of Late Antique studies in so many directions in one single decade. The reader must also be warned that I also, I trust, have learned much from this progress, and should, therefore, pay especial attention to those articles to which I refer as having modifted or criticized my opinions on many topics, in such a way that I would certainly treat these topics in a very different manner were I to write on them at the present time. Peter Brown Department of Classics Urliversity ofCalifomia Berkeley December, 1979 Vll PART I APPROACHES Learning and Imagination t 1T IS ONLY TOO EASY TO PRESENT THE STUDY OF history in a modern university system as if it were a disci pline for the mind alone, and so to ignore the slow and erratic processes which go to the enrichment of the imag ination. Yet it is precisely this imaginative curiosity about the past that is a unique feature of western civilization. Since the eighteenth century, we westerners have taken pleasure, and even thought to derive wisdom, from a persistent attempt to project ourselves into the thoughts and feelings of men and women whose claim to our respect was precisely that they were sensed to be profoundly different from ourselves. This unique respect for the otherness of the past and of other so cieties did not begin in archives; nor was it placed in the cen tre of European culture by antiquarians. It began among dreamers and men of well-stocked imagination. The tap roots of the western historical tradition go deep into the rich and far from antiseptic soil of the Romantic movement. By the standards of a well-run History Department, the Grand Old Men of the historical tribe were wild and woolly. Giam- t An Inaugural Lecture delivered at Royal Holloway College on 26 May 1977. I have appended references only to citations and to some principal authors: the themes I touch on are dealt with mOre fully both in the anicles collected here and in my or Haskell Lectures at the University of Chicago, Tile Cult the Sail/IS: lIs Rise ,1IId FUllCIiol1 in Latill Christianity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press: London: SCM Press, 1981). 3 APPROACHES battista Vico, author of the Scienza Nuova, abandoned law in his youth to write poetry-and emerged a better historian for it. 'For at this age,' he wrote, 'the mind should be given free rein to keep the fiery spirit of youth from being numbed and dried up, lest from too great severity of judgement, proper to maturity but too early acquired, they should later scarcely dare to attempt anything.' 1 In the middle of an exacting history course, it takes a high degree of moral courage to resist one's own conscience: to take time off; to let the imagination run; to give serious attention to reading books that widen our sympathies, that train us to imagine with greater precision what it is like to be human in situations very different from our own. It is essential to take that risk. For a history course to be content to turn out well-trained minds when it could also encourage widened hearts and deeper sympathies would be a mutilation of the intellectual inheritance of our own disci pline. It would lead to the inhibition, in our own culture, of an element of imaginative curiosity about others whose re moval may be more deleterious than we would like to think to the subtle and ever-precarious ecology on which a liberal western tradition of respect for others is based. In warm and lucid pages, my teacher, Arnaldo Momigli ano, a man who can both represent and embrace in his own writings the full richness of the western tradition of historical learning, has warned us ever more frequently that the grip of the study of history on the face of a great culture can be a mere finger-hold. Greeks, Romans and Jews slid with dis quieting ease from the frustrations of the study of the past to take their rest in the eternal verities of science and religion. They readily preferred what was, or could claim to be, a'dis cipline for the mind', abstract, rigorous and certain, to a study of ambiguous status that involved the clash of critical opinion on issues that intimately affected their estimate of I. The Autobiography ofGiambattista Vico, trans. M. H. Fisch and T. G. Bergin (lthaca, 1944), p. 118. 4 LEARNING AND IMAGINATION their fellows, that exposed them to the strains of travel and political experience, and that might even commit the articu late and intelligent man to the tiresome labour of learning foreign languages.2 Pro nobis fabula narratur. If the capacity for imaginative curiosity is part of our handhold on the culture of our age, then it becomes all the more urgent to insist that we train this imagination; that we ask ourselves whether the imaginative models that we bring to the study of history are suffICiently precise and differentiated, whether they embrace enough of what we sense to be what it is to be human, to enable us to understand and to communicate to others the sheer challenge of the past. As an historian of Late Antiquity, I have been brought up against this issue in an abrupt form. I have been forced to understand nothing less than the dynamics of a religious rev olution. Faced by such a challenge, the historian has to take time off for a moment: he has to allow his imagination to be chastened and refined. He has to examine the imaginative models, handed down to him from within his own tradition of learning, that affect his views on a subject as profound as the nature and workings of the religious sentiment in society. What I had wished to understand is an aspect of the re ligious revolution of Late Antiquity that has left a permanent mark on the life, even on the landscape, of western Europe the rise of the cult of saints and of their relics. What I found was that interpretation of this phenomenon is a cross-roads at which the conflicting imaginative models that we bring to the understanding of Late Antiquity as a whole can be seen to converge. Let me begin by sketching out the phenomenon, as it appears in its most concrete form: the genius of Late Antique men lay in their ability to map out, to localize and to render magnificently palpable by every device of art, ceremonial. 2. See, most recently, A. D. Momigliano, Alit'lI Wisdom: Tilt' Limits t~" Hd lenisatioll (Cambridge, 1975)· 5