Peter Brown began his career with a book about Augustine of Hippo, the author of what is thought to be the West’s first autobiography. It’s fitting that Brown caps his career with an autobiography of his own. Brown’s is not a spiritual confession but an intellectual and professional one, as his title, Journeys of the Mind, suggests. Yet Brown isn’t using the term “journeys” in an exclusively metaphorical sense. Geography plays a key role throughout, as travel—from Ireland to the Sudan to Oxford, from Italy to Persia—shapes and broadens his mind as much as any colleague or book.
Born in Dublin in 1935, Brown caught a glimpse, as a boy, of the British Empire in its heyday. The empire, after the addition of formerly Ottoman “mandates,” had reached its largest extent. As the son of a senior railway engineer in the Sudan, Brown “fed [his] Mickey Mouse handkerchief to the resident hippopotamus in the Khartoum Zoo.” (The book is full of such fondly recalled details.) When the British Empire contracted, Brown was just old enough to perceive and understand that process, both in the newspaper accounts of revolutionary uprisings in Africa and India and in the return of his own family to Ireland, where the Browns had to make do on a modest half-pension.
The action of much of Brown’s book takes place in his own mind, specifically its encounters with other minds, both in person and through his readings. His vignettes of these eccentric and kindly figures of bygone academia are fond and full of interest, even for readers who have not encountered their names before. I was delighted to meet R. C. Zaehner, a lover of mysticism and a translator, like me, of the Bhagavad Gita:
He would soften beefsteaks by beating them with the college croquet mallet and . . . read the entire Sanskrit epic Mahabharatha in one such summer. . . . [Zaehner] liked to recount (preferably with drink in hand and with Berlioz playing loudly in the background) Gnostic, Zoroastrian, and Ismaili myths. . . . He once introduced me at lunch to a mystic of his acquaintance whom he studied: a sweet, old-fashioned English country gentleman, with large, dark eyes. He had recently injured his hand, for an ecstasy had come upon him while he was driving a lawn mower across his back meadow.
The proliferation of droll detail and captivating anecdote epitomizes Brown’s personality as a writer. Early in his career, this historian of the late classical world considered becoming an astronomer, then a professor of Greek, and then (inspired by Oxford’s pseudomedieval, nineteenth-century spires) a medievalist. I suspect he could have made it as a novelist, too.
From a storytelling perspective, though, this book, at roughly seven hundred pages, is simply too long for its own good. Brown set for himself the task of tracking the development of his own mind, and so has included a lot of writers, scholars, and mentors he knew personally. It seems he could not bear to leave anyone out; at times, the book resembles a long speech of thanks that keeps listing name after name. Many are cameo appearances. Though Brown takes care to summarize his colleagues’ main ideas or the points he learned from them, the accounting does grow tedious, even for someone who admires this historian and adores his chosen subjects. Surely it would have been enough to say that Augustine of Hippo (1967) was well-received; half a dozen excerpts from newspaper reviews are half a dozen too many.
Each chapter is subdivided into shorter, titled subsections, which I suspect were written as separate notes and bundled chronologically to form the manuscript. The effect is choppy, and a few chapters lack meaningful narrative unity. At the same time, I see the value in Brown’s choice of form; it is a faithful reflection of how human memory works. His mind recalls its own development as a series of startling, transformative encounters. That is exactly right; a smoother, more “processed” version of this book would have falsified Brown’s development into something less serendipitous than it really was.
Journeys of the Mind is still a valuable record, though not everywhere designed with the reader in mind. Brown’s career reflects a deepening and broadening of the historian’s art over the past century. His description of Oxford in the 1950s reveals the limitations of its study of antiquity: the same subjects (very little beyond the reign of Trajan) and the same technique. That technique had not changed much since Edward Gibbon decided to write his history. Gibbon conceived his great book in Rome—and promptly went home to the library and read everything he could. Historiography, for centuries, relied almost exclusively on the written record.
By Brown’s time, the discipline was forced to account for the rise of archaeology, anthropology, the intricate economic analyses of Marxism, and the decline of Eurocentrism in Western thought. An anthropologist who studied witchcraft among the contemporary Azande of South Sudan guided Brown’s investigation of late Rome’s widespread belief in sorcery. Even before his dissertation was finished, Brown had gotten “mud on the boots,” assisting at digs outside Rome by cleaning church frescoes. “By standing on straw bales,” he wrote to his parents at the time,
I was able to wash it [the fresco] down, to reveal beneath the dirt the un-faded colors of a 12th–13th century fresco in the Byzantine provincial style . . . with an inscription by the priest who had made it . . . !
This vignette could equally represent Brown’s later career, restoring late antiquity to its vibrant, living colors. By the 1960s and early 1970s, late-antique Byzantium and Persia, for the first time, were “no longer treated as a marginal topic,” which, in the context of Oxford at the time, “was a revolution in itself.” Journeys of the Mind is in large part the story of the legwork Brown did, both in the library and on the road, to help bring about that reimagining.
The spirit of “field work” goaded Brown, in his study of the doomed Sassanian empire, to Iran, Kabul, and other places in the Islamized world. This “Eastern tilt,” the journey that Brown identifies as the “most decisive” in his own career, may not have been as revolutionary as he claims; Gibbon, centuries earlier, had devoted entire volumes to the foundation of Islam and the rise of the Turks. Still, Brown and his contemporaries brought a renewed focus on developments in these regions, with Brown himself zeroing in on the Syriac world of the Fertile Crescent. Several passages in Journeys of the Mind recall, in their style and even their content, the Iranian travelogues of V. S. Naipaul, and these passages are some of the book’s best. In Tehran, after lecturing sympathetically about pre-Islamic Zoroastrian society, Brown endured protests from young male students in the audience. These zealots, just a few years later, would carry out the Ayatollah Khomeini’s 1979 Revolution; here, they took Brown’s portrait of Sassanian religious pluralism as implicit support of the Shah.
“Classical civilization did not die, it was murdered.”
Throughout the book, Brown shows a great degree of insight into the relationship of his own historical moment to his historiographical writing. If you read the best historians of the generations before him, like Jacob Burckhardt in The Age of Constantine, you find the “senescence,” “exhaustion,” or “decadence” of pagan antiquity taken for granted. These terms get used interchangeably, but they all mean that the late Roman Empire (“late” itself has a connotation) had reached the end of some natural life cycle. This multiracial, multifaith “late Rome,” doomed by the corruption of its ancient ideals, offers a foreboding precedent to doomsayers about the contemporary West. Caught up in these easy parallels, many forget that the Roman Empire, like God or Shakespeare, often serves as a blank screen on which the imagination projects its vision of the present. Though few remember this line of scholarship today, historians in the 1930s convinced themselves that the Roman Empire fell because it became an intolerable “surveillance state” under Diocletian and Constantine, with government overreach in every walk of life. Americans leery of the New Deal, Germans witnessing the rise of Nazism, and Russian intellectuals getting “reeducated” in Stalin’s labor camps all projected their anxieties onto their field of study. The countless edicts of the Theodosian Code (which, as Brown notes, were nearly impossible to enforce in the provinces) became proof of “Big Government” rather than proof of its frantic ineffectuality. Those historians saw in the past what they saw around themselves.
Brown’s generation witnessed what happened to world-dominating Europe between 1914 and 1945 and, in particular, to the British Empire. This sense of an empire dying an unnatural death informed Brown’s approach to the period he chose to study. In the formulation of one of Brown’s early influences: “Classical civilization did not die, it was murdered.” Nothing about the course of its history was predetermined by some Spenglerian mechanism or biological clock. Brown went on to paint a portrait of this period as vibrant, integrating its periphery and negotiating periodic crises in creative ways. Brown did justice, too, to the third-century philosophical and cultural surge of paganism (Plotinus, Porphyry, and others) on the eve of Constantine’s conversion. Not even paganism’s extinction was an inevitability.
Brown’s intellectual travelogue is valuable in two ways. First, it offers a detailed roadmap (complete with Brown’s many wrong turns and scenic excursions) to the study of late antiquity. A reader can use this book to compile a rich reading list of scholars and books that have been forgotten today. Brown discusses several idiosyncratic historians of the era, even ones he disagrees with—another factor that accounts for the book’s length.
Students of history and professional historians, though, should treasure this book for its portrait of an ideal historian’s mind. Brown’s method is far indeed from the judgmental, moralizing, polemical approaches of ideologically motivated historians; he even counters such exalted “Enlightenment” figures of the past as Gibbon and Voltaire, whose witty objectivity marked the limits of their historical empathy. Brown’s approach allowed him to perceive the living power of faith in ancient societies, which is what gave his biography of Augustine—though Brown was neither a theologian nor a classical scholar at the time he wrote it—the roundedness that keeps it authoritative.
Brown’s vision of late antiquity comes across as generous, synoptic in its inclusion of Zoroastrianism and the Islamic world, and free of either anti-Christian or anti-pagan rancor. His great advantage, from the beginning, was his vision of his own discipline:
a perpetual awareness of living beside an immense, strange country whose customs must be treated by the traveler from the present with respect, as often very different from our own; and whose aspirations, fears, and certitudes, though they may seem alien to us and to have turned pale with the passing of time, must be treated as having once run in the veins of men and women in the past with all the energy of living flesh and blood.
Though every historian has his or her own biases, one could do worse than choose, for one’s guide to an era, a historian who defines his endeavor in this way. Though it takes the long way there and back, Journeys of the Mind charts and epitomizes an exemplary career.
