Wealth, the Fall of Rome, and the Making of Christianity in the West, 350-550 AD
By Peter Brown
Reviewed by Dennis Bianchi
This is a very short review of a rather long book. I'm including it because several retired members have said that they primarily read history, not police procedurals or thrillers. I try to read widely across the genres and I believe that if you want to read ancient history, this is a book for you.
Peter Brown, Professor Emeritus of History at Princeton University, is among the most respected authorities in the field of late antiquity and in particular the religious culture of the later Roman Empire and early medieval Europe. In 1935 he was born and, later, educated in Dublin, Ireland. He moved onto to Oxford where his talent became more renown. He was also a professor of Classics at the University of California at Berkeley. His list of awards is long and formidable. He has been honored by the great universities of the Western World, from Great Britain to the United States: from the Netherlands to Spain and Italy. And when he writes he is both scholarly and accessible, a rare combination.
Brown teaches us in this lucid, and understandable written study, the understanding of the role of wealth in the developing Christian communities of the late Roman Empire. Combining the writings of Ambrose, Augustine, Jerome, and Paulinus of Nola with detailed examinations of the lives of average wealthy Christians and their responses to questions regarding wealth, he demonstrates that many bishops offered such Christians the compromises of almsgiving, church building, and testamentary bequests as alternatives to the renunciation of wealth.
The author demonstrates the process by which wealth eventually moved toward the church as the Roman empire disintegrated and how changes in the place of wealth and conceptions of giving in terms of penance and to the poor were major forces in the shift from "ancient" to "medieval" Christianity. His examination of the period shows that the problem of reallocating wealth was as big a problem then as now, where 1% dominate so much more than the remaining 99%.
I purchased this book several months ago and had put it aside for a short while. Then I read an interview of Garry Wills, one of my favorite historians and critics, wherein he stated that this book was one of the best books he had read for many years. I immediately went back to reading it and happily so. It is not a light entertainment. He is a scholar writing for students, but we all should be so lucky as to have had him as a professor. Rome and its demise and Christianity's rise comes to life.
