faith and community around the mediterranean in honor of

ÉTUDES BYZANTINES ET POST-BYZANTINES

Nouvelle série Tome I (VIII)

Faith and Community around the MediterraneanIn Honor of Peter R. L. Brown

Editors

PETRE GURAN and DAVID A. MICHELSON

2019

ACADÉMIE ROUMAINEINSTITUT D’ÉTUDES SUD-EST EUROPÉENNESSOCIÉTÉ ROUMAINE D’ÉTUDES BYZANTINES

Contents

Avant-propos . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5

Contributors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9

Introduction: Dynamics of Faith and Community around the Mediterranean . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11

Peter R.L. BrownReflections on Faith and Community around the Mediterranean . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19

Claudia RappNew Religion—New Communities? Christianity and Social Relations in Late Antiquity and Beyond . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29

David A. Michelson“Salutary Vertigo”: Peter R .L . Brown’s Impact on the Historiography of Christianity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45

Craig H. Caldwell IIIPeter Brown and the Balkan World of Late Antiquity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71

Philippa Townsend“Towards the Sunrise of the World”: Universalism and Community in Early Manichaeism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 77

Petre GuranChurch, Christendom, Orthodoxy: Late Antique Juridical Terminology on the Christian Religion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 105

Nelu ZugravuJohn Chrysostom on Christianity as a Factor in the Dissolution and Aggregation of Community in the Ancient World . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 121

Mark SheridanThe Development of the Concept of Poverty from Athanasius to Cassian . . . . . . . . 141

Kevin KalishThe Language of Asceticism: Figurative Language in St . John Climacus’ Ladder of Divine Ascent . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 153

Jack TannousEarly Islam and Monotheism: An Interpretation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 163

Uriel SimonsohnFamily Does Matter: Muslim–Non-Muslim Kinship Ties in the Late Antique and Medieval Islamic Periods . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 209

Thomas A. CarlsonFaith among the Faithless? Theology as Aid or Obstacle to Islamization in Late Medieval Mesopotamia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 227

Maria MavroudiFaith and Community: Their Deployment in the Modern Study of Byzantino-Arabica . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 239

Hegumenos Dionysius ShlenovImages of Royal Power in Byzantine Ascetic Literature: “King” and “Penthos” in the Works and Background of St . Symeon the New Theologian . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 251

Matthew J. MillinerEmblems of the End: Byzantium’s Dark Angels . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 275

Peter R.L. Brown and Petre GuranIn Search of the Génie du christianisme: An Interview with Peter Brown about Teaching and Research . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 291

Abstracts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 311

Contributors

Peter R. L. Brown is the Philip and Beulah Rollins Professor of History, Emeritus at Princeton University, US.

Craig H. Caldwell, III is Associate Professor of History at Appalachian State University, US.

Thomas A. Carlson is Associate Professor of Middle Eastern History at Oklahoma State University, US.

Petre Guran is a Research Fellow at the Institute for South-East European Studies of the Romanian Academy, Romania.

Kevin Kalish is Associate Professor of English at Bridgewater State University, US.

Maria Mavroudi is Professor of History at the University of California, Berkeley, US.

David A. Michelson is Associate Professor of the History of Christianity at Vanderbilt University, US.

Matthew J. Milliner is Associate Professor of Art History at Wheaton College, US.

Claudia Rapp is Professor of Byzantine Studies at the University of Vienna and Director of the Division of Byzantine Research in the Institute for Medieval Research at the Austrian Academy of Sciences, Austria.

Mark Sheridan, OSB, is a Benedictine monk living in Abu Ghosh in the Holy Land and Professor Emeritus in the Faculty of Theology at the Pontificio Ateneo S. Anselmo, Rome, Italy.

Dionysius Shlenov is the Director of Greek Christian Literature in the Department of Christian Literature at Moscow Theological Academy, Russia.

Uriel Simonsohn is Senior Lecturer in the Department for Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at the University of Haifa, Israel.

Jack Tannous is Associate Professor of History and John Witherspoon Bicentennial Preceptor in the Department of History at Princeton University, US.

Philippa Townsend is Chancellor’s Fellow of New Testament and Christian Origins at the University of Edinburgh, U.K.

Nelu Zugravu is Professor of Late Antique History and Civilization and leads the Centre for Classical and Christian Studies at the Alexandru Ioan Cuza University of Iaşi, Romania.

In Search of the Génie du christianisme An Interview with Peter Brown about

Teaching and Research

Peter R.L. Brown and Petre Guran(Princeton, New Jersey, US, June 16, 2006)

Petre Guran: I will start by confessing the way I discovered you in the early 1990s, when I was still in college. I read the French translation of your Society and the Holy, La société et le sacré.1 My basic reading about religion at that point was Eliade’s work and a few glimpses into C.G. Jung. Reading you I had the impression of an anti-Eliade. For Mircea Eliade or C. G. Jung, as I read them, there was no place for history in religion. You could always reduce the circumstantial and historical manifestations of religion to general patterns, to an essence, an identity.

I think that you were saying exactly the opposite, that there is something in the historical development of religion, which distinguishes one religion from another, and even one religious epoch from another. There is a quality in history which makes a religious manifestation unique. You spoke also about the “religious revolution” in Late Antiquity.2 I was sensitive to this point, because Eliade did not seem to recognize any particular role to Christianity. He understood Christianity at the same level as archaic religions,

1 P. Brown, Society and the Holy in Late Antiquity (University of California Press, 1982); P. Brown, La Société et le sacré dans l’antiquité tardive, traduit de l’anglais par A. Rousselle (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1985).

2 P. Brown, The World of Late Antiquity, AD 150-750 (New York, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971).

Peter R.L. Brown and Petre Guran292

expressing the same patterns, the same human needs. Meanwhile you were saying that Christianity changed something substantially in human history, and that its European and Mediterranean character is essential.

I read you also as an apologist of Christian uniqueness, but in a very special and subtle way. You were neither the kind of confessionally-marked historian of Christianity, nor the constantly mocking, post-Voltairian historian. Later I realized that throughout your long intellectual career you constantly enriched and refined your method, which ended in a quite complex system of layers and shifts in your historical thought. In the 1971 article, you were proposing a functionalist analysis of the holy man, a view which changed in your writings of the 1980s, when the religious specificity of Christianity came more into focus—in The Cult of the Saints (1981)3 and the Body and Society (1988).4 In a debate about the ‘holy man’, organized 25 years after the publication of your article, you were recalling how much you went against the established scholarship at that time. How did you come to this stand and what led the development of your historical thinking?

A Strong Determination to Write a “Génie du christianisme”Peter Brown: No doubt whatsoever I was persuaded that, as a historian, one

had to measure Christianity as a particular subject and to consider those elements that Christianity did not share with other religions. The difference was what the historian should go for. Whether that methodological choice had an apologetic purpose, in chronological perspective, it wasn’t my intention. I was not a practicing Christian at that time. That wasn’t there in the back of my mind. What was there was a historian’s strong determination to write a “génie du christianisme”, to really see what the distinctive outlines of this religion were; what did it not share with the polytheist world, or with the Jewish world, or with the Islamic world.

PG: As a reader and admirer of Chateaubriand I am excited to hear this turn of phrase.PB: In the late 1960s and early 1970s, it was a ferocious commitment to the particularity

of the religious phenomenon of the late Roman world. Mircea Eliade, to be frank, and C. G. Jung were a little bit at the corner of my field.

PG: But you knew Eliade?PB: I knew his work, not very well, but I knew psychoanalysis extremely well. My first

wife was a psychoanalyst, coming from an Eastern European, Czech, background, and one of her lasting preoccupation was how to reconcile Freud’s very analytical

3 Cf. P. Brown, “The Rise and Function of the Holy Man in Late Antiquity.” The Journal of Roman Studies 61 (1971): 80–101, and idem. The Cult of the Saints: Its Rise and Function in Latin Christianity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981).

4 P. Brown, The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity (Columbia University Press, 1988).

In Search of the Génie du christianisme 293

psychology with a more dynamic emphasis not simply on the archetype, on the archeology of the ego, but on the actual object relations which fit in with a much more dynamic view of religion, i.e. what is the role of idealization, of projection, the psychological mechanisms that create the sacred? There was a slight alliance .

PG: So Jung was still in the background.PB: Jung was there as a rejected model. I read the Eranos Jahrbücher religiously. Henri

Charles Puech wrote on Manichaeism in the Eranos Jahrbücher: “The Problem of Evil in Manichaeism.”5 I would constantly be going there, but, again, their views struck me as being as immovable as Stonehenge. The people, who were fond of such creations, were contenting themselves with static and grandiose constructions. If they were not so grandiose I wouldn’t have objected so much.

PG: Yes, I see.PB: At a time before historians began to deal with the “longue durée”—one must

remember Braudel’s work was not available in English translation until the mid 1970s, though, I had read Braudel in French and I was aware that not everything happens quick, quick, quick, that there are long rhythms6—but, to reconstruct that mood of the late 1960s/early 1970s, it was a very visceral reaction against any over-static view of religious history and missing the fine print, the fine detail, particularities. Hence, the immense appeal of functional anthropology. It was, again, a strategic appeal. It gave you a sense of the human measure in the creation of systems of the sacred.

PG: But, you never became a functionalist.PB: No, but it represented for me a very important alliance, because it denied

history in a rather different way, i.e. it insisted on the fact that if you wanted to understand a religious phenomenon you had to place it in the immediate context of the immediate expectations of those who were engaged in it. It meant that the invocation of the “longue durée”, such as C. G. Jung and Mircea Eliade, was basically ruled out. On this issue I have rather changed my mind. One has to do a macro-intellectual history and a micro-intellectual history. Macro-intellectual

5 First part of the study by H.-C. Puech, “Der Begriff der Erlösung im Manichäismus,” Eranos-Jahrbuch, 1936 (Zurich, 1937), p. 185-286, English translation “The Concept of Redemption in Manichaeism” [1936], in The Mystic Vision, ed. J. Campbell, Papers from the Eranos Yearbooks, Bollingen Series XXX.6 (Princeton, NJ, 1968) 247-312: 1. The Gnostic and Manichaean Notions of Redemption: The Problem of Evil in Manichaeism, 2. The Theoretical Foundations of Redemption: The Cosmological and the Anthropological Myth, 3. The Realization and Practical Instruments of Redemption.

6 F. Braudel, “La longue durée,” Annales (1958), p. 725-753; idem, La Méditerranée et le monde méditerranéen à l’époque de Philippe II (Paris: Armand Colin, 1949).


history at that time produced a very real dissatisfaction with the sort of “Ideale Himmelswolken,”7 which seemed to me to freeze history.Then there was the micro-history which was a great reaction. Young scholars, like yourself, have to pass through “l’âge ingrate,” a very creative part of one’s existence, during which, you know, one is anxious not to accept received wisdom. Where I found received wisdom was weighing too heavily on the subject was the assumption of mindless continuities.I read very carefully, because it was all that was available at that time, the Religionsgeschichtliche Vorarbeiten, all of which were actually wonderful studies, you know, a world that produces Erik Peterson cannot be completely wrong. But there was an abuse of the sheer comparative method. What struck me ultimately as mere pedantry was, on the one hand, the assumption of continuities so as to prove that you as Herr Professor know more than anybody else, on the other hand, the absence of analytical sharpness. All right, what they have in common we know, but what do they not have in common? For example: the cult of Saint Andrew at Patras. Everybody in the Religionsgeschichtliche Schule knew that Pausanias described a spring and a well in Patras, though all that Pausanias said was that those who could see their reflection in the well knew that they were destined to die, but that was not Saint Andrew who gives life. It was a sound awareness that I was dealing with two very different religious types, even if they were coinciding in the same place. Now with 20-30 years more knowledge I would look at interferences between the two belief systems, but at that time, I remember, just coming out of the Ashmolean Library, having read Gregory of Tours and Pausanias, I said to myself “something has really come in between”.

PG: But this is like questions raised by archeology: where would you put your house in Italy, for example, if not on some Roman ruins. Where could you find a better place to build but where innumerous generations before you have built?

PB: On the other hand, at that time, it was the constellation of expectations which plainly revealed two different worlds.

7 Reference to Heinrich Heine’s poem “Die Götter Griechenlands”, the following verses: Und am hellblaun, sternlosen Himmel / Schweben die weißen Wolken, / Wie kolossale Götterbilder / Von leuchtendem Marmor. / Nein, nimmermehr, das sind keine Wolken! / Das sind sie selber, die Götter von Hellas, / Die einst so freudig die Welt beherrschten, / Doch jetzt, verdrängt und verstorben, / Als ungeheure Gespenster dahinziehn / Am mitternächtlichen Himmel.


The World of Tolkien and LewisPG: Wasn’t a similar constellation of expectations the inspiration for Tolkien’s and C.S.

Lewis’s literary fiction, a world of synthesis and continuities from the Classical, Germanic and Celtic world to Christianity?8

PB: That was a very poignant world. As a medievalist, strangely enough, those issues of continuity really do speak, especially if one comes from an Irish Protestant culture to that heavy mystical Anglicanism. In a sense, I am very much the product of that world by my reactions, usually against it.When I grew up I was very much influenced by C. S. Lewis, religiously as well as intellectually, you cannot make that distinction. He played a role in widening and enriching my intellectual, imaginative life.

PG: I don’t know if I am right, I think I noticed, comparing the writings of Jones9 or Dodds10 with yours, that you were very different in style. Your historical writing is much more colorful.

PB: I am closer to C.S. Lewis.11 I write like a medievalist, not like an ancient historian. I have not much shame about that.

PG: There is a school of style to which you belonged and you brought that style into ancient studies.

PB: All of my friends trained as classicists noticed this immediately.PG: Were there also problems of misunderstanding because of your style?PB: Certainly. Averil Cameron, with whom I constantly debated this issue, she always

accuses me of believing more than the evidence says. I am a medievalist; I believe that there is a world out there. Any piece of evidence is purely microcosmic. Here is the difference created by the medievalist, he will shed light on a fragment in a charter or a piece of architecture, saying this is the microcosm which will tell us about the background of a Flemish primitive painting. You know that there is more around it.

8 J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis were part of a circle of medieval and literary scholars at Oxford, “the Inklings”, which met from the 1930s to the 1950s. These scholars were not only interested in mythology and medieval literature but also wrote original works of literature (such as Tolkien’s The Hobbit) as well as Christian theology and apologetics.

9 A.H.M. Jones (1904-1970), The later Roman Empire, 284-602: A social economic and administrative survey, (Oxford, Blackwell, 1964); idem, The decline of the ancient world (New York, 1966).

10 E.R. Dodds (1893-1973), the author of The Greeks and the Irrational (London, 1951) and Pagan and Christian in an Age of Anxiety (Cambridge, New York, 1965).

11 Brown arrived as an undergraduate at Oxford while Lewis was still teaching there at Magdalen College. Lewis moved in 1955 to Cambridge.


I write like a medievalist with a real sense that one’s duty is to conjure up a world, which, you just know instinctively, is broader than what you see.

PG: This relationship between microcosm and macrocosm brought you to the understanding that Christianity is basically adaptable to the microcosm, but the macrocosmic pattern gets integrally realized in the microcosm.

PB: This is not something I felt so strongly in the 1970s. I was concerned with the characteristics. You cannot explain a phenomenon until you delineate it properly. It’s a draftsman problem. Unless you can delineate a problem, you are wasting your time trying to explain it. You have to get exactly what does something actually mean. An example, that I used very much, is Alberto Tenenti’s study of the notion of the macabre,12 of those horrifying decay corpse tombs in the fifteenth century, and he described it in such a way that you could say, oh yes, this is actually an inverted respect for the physicality of the human condition. If you compare that explanation linked to a correct delineation of the corpse in the memorials and prayers, if you compare what the people actually thought about this with the normal description of the dance of death or of the Black Death, you suddenly realize that he, in a quiet way, has described a phenomenon in such a way that it invites a new interpretation. I think therefore that the issue of description is particularly important, like a draftsman drawing the outline correctly. What actually does the cult of the saints mean, what does a certain practice mean, what does going to Symeon Stylites mean to the contemporaries? If you describe it correctly, you get the overall understanding of the phenomenon.

PG: Coming to the second layer of Peter Brown’s thought. What happened between 1971 and the early 1980s, when The Cult of the Saints or the article “The Saint as an Exemplar”13 appeared?

A Change of ParadigmPB: It was just the beginning of a change of paradigm. First of all I was increasingly

dissatisfied by the purely functionalist view of the holy man. The great advantage of making the holy man a particular, a precipitate of strategies, either conscious or semi-conscious, of a living society, in a particular context, in a particular time, was that it freed me from Jung, from Eliade, and from those awful German pedants of Religionsgeschichtliche Versuche und Vorarbeiten. You cannot believe what freedom it was!

12 A. Tenenti, La vie et la mort à travers l’Art du XVe siècle, Cahiers des Annales, 8 (Paris, Armand Colin, 1952).

13 P. Brown, “The Saint as an Exemplar in Late Antiquity”, Representations 2 (Spring 1983), p. 1-25.


PG: But your new perspective of the early 1980s was a purely intellectual process; you didn’t become a practicing Christian yet?

PB: At that time I began to practice, but the change came partly because I had traveled a lot in the Islamic countries in previous years. I also started to go to Orthodox services in Oxford, to the chapel of Saint Gregory and Saint Macrina, which displayed what I would call Anglo-Orthodoxy, where you would meet relatives of Pasternak, or Dimitri Obolensky.14 It taught me one very important thing, which is that objects of devotion and love, and majesty, do have a momentum, in such a way that to describe them as the sum total of social strategies maybe the beginning of wisdom, but it is not the end of it. Therefore I become much more interested, through reading Clifford Geertz, in the study of “adhesion”. I had not dealt with the subject of adhesion. Why do people love certain things or adhere to certain things? And there, if you look carefully, is Clifford Geertz15 and Edward Shils.16

PG: You gave me Shills, to read.

The Shrine of Imam Rezah at MashhadPB: Nowadays it may look different, but at that time it was a significant new perspective.

Because it did ring up with my experience, again a very mediated experience of traveling around Iran, that one had to face problems of adherence.

PG: That was the Shah’s Iran?PB: That was the Shah’s Iran, but things were bubbling already. I was very aware of that.PG: You were aware that modernity was not ready to “adhere” to that society so easily.PB: I had no illusion about that. I was taken by surprise only by the violence with which

it finally happened, but I sensed things. I felt guilty like a child for the parents’ divorce, because I sensed things; I blamed myself of not sensing even more. I remember being at the shrine of Imam Reza at Mashhad, where I went in basically as an honorary Muslim. I was at the healing shrine, having been for a long time. When I came back from Afghanistan, I went again to Mashhad for one of the great high feasts of the year, with a tremendous amount of ritual breast beating. I was in the crowd there. I came back to the hotel, and I realized my chest was black and blue. I just had not realized …

14 Sir Dimitri Obolensky, FBA, FSA was born in 1918 in Russia to a family of Russian nobility. After the Russian Revolution, Obolensky settled in the U.K. where he studied and taught Russian and Balkan medieval history at Cambridge. In 1949 he began to teach at Oxford where he remained until his death in 2001.

15 C. Geertz, Negara: The Theatre State in Nineteenth-Century Bali (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980).

16 E. Shils, Center and Periphery: Essays in Macrosociology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975).


PG: that you were also completely adhering to that manifestation of the holy?PB: Yes, yes, over-coming you. No, no, no, there are other things I have to understand.

I do think that that Islamic experience, which I haven’t talked much about, got me to change my paradigm.

PG: But you never felt it is enough to say: “psychologie des masses—I was caught by that, and that’s all.”17

PB: No, no, no. That gets you into fog. That’s based on contempt somewhere.I was very struck by the big number of young men seeking healing, and the way in which the real religious drama was not around the shrine. There you could experience already-realized eschatology. If you want to experience realized eschatology go to Mashhad. Once you are there in the atmosphere produced by the forceful exclamations of “Salamat, salamat,” “healing, healing,” once you are there you are bound to be healed. But, at the gate of the impure, the Silver gate, I saw a young man just hanging on the gate as if on electrical wires on powers and weeping. And the family then deciding if so-and-so was enough forgiven their sins. I traveled back in the bus with a few of them, young men suffering from various psychological troubles, schizophrenia, and what happened was that their family, having allowed them to be healed by the Imam Reza, accepted it.

PG: The family means the father and the uncles?PB: Yes, yes. And how could I possibly have seen that aspect, if I had simply looked at

the hysterical weeping? It was a matter of ethnographic craftsmanship.PG: Traveling in the bus, did you get the impression that they were healed? PB: Yes, they where healed in the functional sense that their family got well along with

the fact.PG: A reconciliation of the family with the fact of the illness.PB: That, again, is too cunning an explanation, because there are other things involved

in it. On the one hand, I was anxious to maintain an anthropological perspective. On the other hand, I was dealing with forces of continuity, and above all the adhesion of people into this continuity. Quite frankly, my “Holy Man” article,18 although very vivid, it lacked that dimension.

PG: But you retrieved that dimension in Authority and the Sacred .19

17 Expression related to G. Le Bon’s, Psychologie des foules (Paris, 1895), and its criticism by S. Freud, Psychologie des masses et analyse du moi (1921).

18 P. Brown, “The Rise and Function of the Holy Man in Late Antiquity” The Journal of Roman Studies 61 (1971), p. 80-101.

19 P. Brown, Authority and the Sacred: Aspects of the Christianisation of the Roman World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).


The Body and SocietyPB: Authority and the Sacred was published in 1995, the conferences were in 1993. But

in the meantime I wrote The Body and Society.20 One of my most self-indulgent books, I enjoyed very much writing it. That was a real celebration to be in an American environment to write that book.

PG: In what sense?PB: First, I had the time to do it. And then, this was a society where issues of the body

and sexuality were very heated.PG: In a society obsessed with sexuality.PB: Yes, yes. For a historian of religion that wasn’t necessarily a good time. I arrived

in September 1978, shortly before the Jones massacre (these were sectarians who committed suicide in British Guyana).21 Arriving in Berkeley as an expert in religion I was marked as a total weirdo. And then to make things worse the Ayatollah Khomeini happened and then Harvey Milk was assassinated by an antigay activist murderer.22 These were lively times. What surprised me very much was when I discovered that the American Academia pulled out of the political debate. The Iranian revolution was like listening to Beethoven played on a “tinny” recording. Coming from England, where, a few months before, I had met both the Prime Minister and Miss Lambton,23 a formidable lady who had written the authoritative grammar of Modern Persian—and who, when I announced that I had read her grammar twice, merely replied, rather sharply: Why did you not learn it the first time?—drinking sherry together, at a meeting of the British Academy, it was pathetic to see, in the USA, a country that had one of the most professional

20 P. Brown, The Body and Society . Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity (Columbia University Press, 1988).

21 “The Jonestown Massacre” was a mass-murder on November 18, 1978 in which nearly 1,000 members of “The People’s Temple” led by the Reverend Jim Jones were killed in a religiously motivated mass-suicide at the Jonestown compound in Guyana. The massacre began with the assassination of Congressman Leo Ryan who represented California’s eleventh congressional district (which included portions of the Bay Area near Berkeley) and had been investigating allegations about the religious movement. Jones and his followers had previously been prominent in the civic and political life of San Francisco, thus the Jonestown events were closely followed in the Bay Area at the time Brown arrived there.

22 On November 27, 1978 (shortly after the Jonestown Massacre), Harvey Milk, a member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, was assassinated along with the Mayor of San Francisco (George Moscone) by a political rival, Daniel White. Milk was the first openly gay politician to be elected in California and many perceived that both the assignation and the relatively light sentence of the murderer were motivated by antigay prejudice. The Bay Area response to the assassinations was a major civic event.

23 “Nancy” A.K.S. Lambton was was a Reader in Persian at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London and author of Persian Grammar (1953) and Persian Vocabulary (1954) as well as several monographs on Persian ethnography, geography, and society.


series of Near Eastern Studies departments in the world being totally denied the opportunity to give advice—or even denying itself the wish to offer it. The basic momentum of the American society was to not take the issues of religion as seriously as they should be taken.

PG: They had freed themselves from it.PB: And they didn’t do it intentionally. The momentum of the society gave people no

way of understanding that phenomenon. This was a society who freed itself from religion so recently that they couldn’t understand a society who was still in the grip of what they freed themselves of.

PG: The chronology of this liberation from religion would be the 1960s and the 1970s?PB: Rather the 1960s, maybe the 1950s, although progressivist American tradition

reaches much earlier. They really had abandoned it, and then religion began happening in other places in ways which caused them great embarrassment. What was poignant for me at that moment was the sense of loosing our world. I had been in Iran only the year before. I had seen the first rumblings of the revolution. I knew that this was powerful. But, on the other hand, the politics of the body, that was what people really listened to. I have no doubt that that gave me a great deal of momentum to do the book. This was the context which explains why I used the term “holy”. I think I understood why I used the term “holy” better when I wrote The Body and Society, than I did…

A Terminological Choice: The “Holy” and “Le sacré”PG: When you published the Society and the Holy…PB: Yes, which was borrowed basically from my “Holy Man” article. If you are living

in a non-Catholic society you don’t really believe in saints. To call Saint Martin a holy man places him on the same level as some guru in India, Gandhi among them, or the Muslim holy men in my father’s Sudan, who were rather firmly dealt with at that time.

PG: In a Catholic environment you would have called your “holy man” the “saint”.PB: And that would have been confessionally too marked. I think Aline Rousselle made

the decision to translate “holy” by “le sacré”, and she is very much an anticlerical writer.24 She was right to opt for the more neutral concept of the history of religion term. My way of deconfessionalizing that same concept was “holy man”. Her way to deconfessionalize it was “le sacré”. To translate it as “Le saint et la société” would immediately have conjured up Saint Ambrose confronting the emperor Theodosius.

24 P. Brown, Le culte des saints . Son essor et sa fonction dans la chrétienté latine, traduit de l’anglais par A. Rousselle (Paris: CERF, 1984).


Aline Rousselle translated Le culte des saints and one year later La société et le sacré.25 Paradoxically, the French use of “le sacré” was her way of departicularizing.

PG: But, in my view that term brought you too close to the vocabulary of a Georges Dumézil or Eliade.

PB: I agree, but don’t forget that “holy” had very much the same generalized connotations in English vocabulary. I deliberately used “holy man” for the simple reason that it was a phrase which in normal English was normally applied to an active agent.

PG: The saint is a dead holy man.PB: Yes, exactly. For me the way of breaking out of the confessional context was to use

that rather vague term. My colleagues criticized it and brought up very widely that sanctus is a relatively recent word and that sacer would have fit better the epoch I was describing, and they are partially right, but in terms of English usage and the mobilization of associations, what I wanted to get is the balance between what an anthropologist would call achieved status and ascribed status, just that balance.

PG: Saint Antony or Saint Symeon would very much agree with you and would protest against the title “saint” as a special distinction awarded to them and call themselves sinners. “Saint” is in this sense (as opposed to Saint Paul’s use of it—where any member of the Church is saint) a late medieval term, fully worked out by the process of canonization which started at that time in the Catholic Church.

PB: Without any doubt you are right, but don’t forget one of the things which concerned me very much—and here one rebels against long-, long-rooted traditions—is that if you come from a Protestant background and read scholarship which is very heavily Protestant—you know good scholarship is German you cannot help against it—you are aware of that deep, gloomy Lutheran certainty that no one can be a saint. I was very much there, that was a more personal issue. I felt that really limited the human choices, the human capacity for loyalty, to have things done in this world. On the other hand it was also very much a 1970s world, in which the possibility of an existential Christianity was a great concern; hence I ended “The Saint as exemplar” with a quotation from that German member of “die bekennende Kirche”, the pastor Bonhoeffer.26 The issue which was very important at that time was to find out to what extent is a certain amount of religious vividness

25 P. Brown, La Société et le sacré dans l’antiquité tardive, traduit de l’anglais par A. Rousselle (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1985).

26 P. Brown, “The Saint as Exemplar in Late Antiquity,” p. 25, quoting Dietrich Bonhoeffer: “it is becoming clear every day that the most urgent problem besetting our church is this: how can we live the Christian life in the modern world” to which Brown answers: “I would strongly recommend that an hour spent in the company of a Pachomius, an Abba Sisoes or a Saint Martin can tell us more than a whole course in modern dogmatics, how to begin to answer the challenge posed by Dietrich Bonhoeffer.”


allowed in this world, and this quest went against the heavy Lutheran-Protestant denial and the Catholic ecclesiastical institutionalization. Between the two they managed to drain the blood out of Late Antiquity.

American FreedomPG: The real change of paradigm intervened with the Body and society. PB: I think it didn’t intervene. One often writes books to get problems out of your

blood.PG: Was there any event which produced or was the incentive for this reconsideration?PB: Oh yes, it really was the move from Europe to the United States. I ended up with a

great respect for the American need to treat ultimate questions seriously, precisely because they were the free society. That struck me when I came to California; it wasn’t the trendiness or the frivolity, almost the exact opposite. These were people who for the first time were free to face such life issues. They had to think carefully what they wanted to do with their freedom. In Berkeley, for all its trendiness, I was in among more people who thought seriously about what they should do with their lives, down to very old fashioned things like...

PG: Marry or not marry…PB: Marry or not marry, do you go to visit old people, do you work at the terminal

cancer hospital, real people taking rather old fashioned choices in this totally new fashioned way.

PG: This is very much still around. In my experience in these two years I came to notice how “conservative” American liberals are.

PB: Oh yes, oh enormously.PG: This brings me to another question. Do you think that a society freed from

religion, like the American one, could rediscover religion, could return to religion? Or is the historical movement always in one sense?

PB: I never believed in the historical movement being in one direction. I think that what has happened (and I cannot see beyond this), what I have noticed (and I feel it does touch me also intellectually, not simply as an observer or outsider) is the inhibition of discussion on religious topics. In a very old fashioned English way, people do not talk religion. There is no public value, and identities which may be derived from religious belief or practice are treated as utterly irrelevant. I noticed with my old supervisor, Arnaldo Momigliano, who was a profound Spinoza atheist, nonetheless, he felt, in America, when he came to Chicago, the freedom about being Jewish, to enjoy the synagogue liturgy, to go to rather serious liturgically moving services, which I know from my own observation, he never experienced in


England or in Italy. The blocks were off. He was not anymore in that very conscious hierarchy of public versus private, which often for very good reasons favors the “état laïc” and does not encourage the filtering of religious identities into public discourse. In America that has broken down, just as in many Islamic countries. Turkey is a positive example, where it has also broken down. What that can mean for the future I am not so sure.

Un avatar du Bas-Empire?PG: There was a period when discussion about or affirmation of religious identities

was suspended and then again the religious component of the human being came back to public attention. Is this phenomenon to be placed in the second part of the 1990s?

PB: I think so. I don’t like to draw comparisons between Late Antiquity and the modern age, because I think both epochs have screwed up in their own way. One is just an alibi for the other. To think that we are only “un avatar du Bas-Empire,” as Brătianu thought, that is basically reassuring.27 What is not so reassuring is that we have screwed up so heroically (“nous nous sommes trouvés dans la merde / nous avons gaché nos propres chances”) that any analogy with the Later Empire is totally irrelevant. It is even less reassuring that, in a period with a great sense of history, like ours, one could indulge in the fantasy that we are living the “end” of the Roman Empire. They were living their own “end”. This is the difference between “individual judgment” and “final judgment”.

PG: The “end” of the Roman Empire is not an end after all, or an end without end?PB: An “end” which is not historically meaningful. It is a consolation we cannot allow

ourselves to have. If there are analogies which might be helpful, lessons which we can learn out of history, I think that our time could develop a greater tolerance to the entry of religion into public discourse. It is not necessarily a total disaster. One can only hope that it wouldn’t get too far. Knowing human nature there will always be a danger that it might get too far. We are at least living in a phase in which one should avoid alarmist attitudes.

PG: Looking back into history, when Averil Cameron gave her paper on “Censorship and Control of Thought in Byzantium” what seemed reassuring, as she remarked

27 G.I. Brătianu, “Introduction: vers le Bas-Empire” in Études byzantines d’histoire économique et sociale, Paris, 1938, p. 19: “Si cette tendance (contemporaine) à l’Étatisme absolu est aussi nette, il est logique à rechercher non seulement les origines, mais aussi le but et les conséquences, et c’est encore à l’histoire du Bas-Empire qu’il nous faudra recourir, tellement il est vrai que la fin du monde antique est ‘un des spectacles les plus passionnants qui puissent s’offrir aux regards de l’historien et du sociologue.’ A ce jugement d’un historien, il convient d’ajouter qu’il n’y a pas d’exemple plus instructif pour suivre les cours tumultueux des événements actuels et tâcher d’en entrevoir le sens et la direction.”


herself, was that she could enumerate almost all the cases of violent religious intolerance in 1000 years of Byzantine history in a 40 minutes conference. The catalogue didn’t seem too long, although the least we can say about Byzantium is that it was not a liberal society.

PB: Well, lovely society, a society which can get it over in just 40 minutes. PG: This allows us a little bit of optimism.PB: I think so. It is very, very important to look into such societies, which resemble our

Near East. We may well have to establish peace with fundamentalist non terrorist regimes in the Near East that are not committed to the notion of jihad. And we have to look into our own society to find some analogue which would enable us to do so. The same with modern Russia, the same, I might imagine, with modern Romania.

PG: What concerns Romania I feel is that it will get so quickly Europenized/Westernized, that religious identities might soon be suspended like in Western societies.

PB: That is what you see for the moment, as long as your country is still preoccupied with visa issues. People do tend to underestimate the links of religious adherence. The debates nowadays in the European Council show it. The Polish delegates really don’t approve of abortion still. They are living in a different time zone and they may not be living in the wrong time zone.

PG: Let me tell you a legend which circulated after the students’ revolts of May 1968 in Paris. At some point students suspended on the walls of the Sorbonne a big banner, on which it was written “Dieu est mort,” signed Nietzsche. Apparently, the next day on a building across the Sorbonne another banner appeared stating “Nietzsche est mort,” signed Dieu. You might well be the author of such a joke.

PB: Oh, I love that. That’s about it. I think there we were profoundly misled in our judgments on the Islamic world, only 20 years ago. Historians really have to stand up and be responsible, not just the developmental economists, we (historians) also colluded in a progressive discourse, and this is likely to happen again and again.

***

Do Miracles Happen?PB: I remember an encounter with Bishop Kallistos, at that time Timothy Ware. He

came once to the Byzantine Society, it was in 1971. To my great regret at that time I wasn’t fully aware of the “Questions of Barsanouphios and John,” and I didn’t use this text in my “Holy Man” article. He said, “this text proves that the holy man was


not just a social worker,” looking very hard at me. It was a reminder from a very distinguished place that I didn’t totally get it right.

PG: What is the mechanism of miracles? Do miracles happen? PB: I have seen them; I saw some happen in Mashhad. What one should ask is: what are

those conditions, psychological and social, that make people certain that miracles cannot happen? I put it the other way round; I put it in terms of expectations. And there I would use Erik Peterson once again, his Heis Theos,28 which basically puts the main weight of the miracle of the epiphaneia on its subject of reception. There is an example of the best sort of Religionsgeschichte, which really tells you something, makes you shift.

PG: It seems like Christ knew something about it. Before working a miracle He always asked the beneficiary of the miracle: Do you really believe I can do it?

PB: Expectations are the thing. That’s why incubatory miracles are so important; there the patient has the courage to tell the god how ill he or she is. Nowadays you never get those acclaiming crowds, but we have different ways of raising the expectations. If you go to votive shrines in South of France or around Turin, people who have miracles are almost always those who felt entitled to them, the sturdy, comfortable, homestead farmers. You don’t get miracles in the more depressed rural districts of that area, because they don’t feel they are entitled to them. Maybe you have here also a social selection of those who can afford to offer ex votos, but I feel this explanation does not get the whole answer. I was struck to discover in the Consolata in Turin or in the French shrines, the greater the advance in medical science, the more miracle ex-votos, because of the two expectations, medical and religious, of a general rising of the level of potentialities of life. The rhetoric always shows the French doctor standing totally flummoxed by this remarkable event. In fact the doctor has as much to do with the rising potentialities of the miracle.

PG: I understand now a lesson my father had to learn as a young doctor from a normally agnostic famous professor of medicine, who always repeated that any medical success is due to the expectation of the patient to survive the disease. He was saying in Romanian: “a avut zile,” “the patient had more days to live,” the doctor is just an instrument of the still mysterious phenomenon of curative action.

PB: That’s it. I think it is interesting to study groups that believe in miracles. Nowadays it takes the form of prayer groups, rather discreet healing ceremonies backed up by prayer groups.

28 E. Peterson, Heis Theos, Forschungen zur Religion und Literatur des Alten und Neuen Testaments 24 (Göttingen, 1926).


Modern PaideiaPG: A last curiosity: about the modern paideia. How should we train the young

generations? You taught a lot of generations of graduate and undergraduate students in the best universities in America.

PB: As a teacher one has very limited goals in comparison with how complex people are. One must be aware how little the teacher knows about the students. It would be a big error to treat the university as a consciousness raising institution. This is the great vice of the American universities. A lot of their populism and liberalism is based on an enormously “de haut en bas” view. They are there to somehow change the consciousness, which is just as “de haut en bas” as the attitude of Princeton training executives for the CIA. Really, “plus ça change, plus ça reste le même,” I am very cynical in this aspect. To make people politically correct is just the same as it was sending them out to serve the CIA, in the 1950s; it appeals to the same elitist instinct. And maybe elites are there to do these things, and one shouldn’t be totally ashamed of it, but at least one should be aware that there is a sociological connotation behind it.

PG: What else can the teacher then do besides maintaining the elitist feelings of his students?

PB: One of the limited duties of the teacher is to rescue the imagination. There is where the C.S. Lewis and Tolkien wins over the E.R. Dodds.29 I am not wholly explicable in terms of Irish Protestantism, that was too limited a background despite its huge strength. I am very much the product of a sort of “Tory mysticism,” with which I became enriched when I came to Oxford, the valuing of imagination, a deliberate romantic feeling that the modern age is not the only age you have to live in. Part of one’s duty as a teacher is to make people realize that we would seem very odd to people in the past, just as the other way round. In terms of a paideia of the students, what the historian can do, is to give young people the feeling that they themselves can look very different seen from other viewing points, a real de-centering of a person. The students who do best, those who have learned, did it through a real process of de-centering.

PG: For this purpose one needs to study the human sciences. PB: I began being a ferociously keen amateur astronomer, which was for me a process of

de-centering. Whether it is cosmic or historical it doesn’t matter. What education

29 Lewis’ inaugural lecture at Cambridge, “De Descriptione Temporum,” may give a flavor of some of the sentiment of “Tory mysticism” which Brown mentions. Lewis makes an impassioned plea for historical understanding to transcend the “Great Divide” between ancient and modern. See C.S. Lewis, “De Descriptione Temporum”: An Inaugural Lecture by the Professor of Medieval and Renaissance English Literature in the University of Cambridge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1955).


shouldn’t do is to lock people in what Bertrand Russell called the “parochialism of time”. Any system which de-centers self-consciousness I call welcome. For me certainly as a young person, cosmic speculation, dreams of life on another planet, reading about nebulae, real de-centering, the old fashioned late antique belief in the divinity of universe, that was one way. I myself prefer today the historian’s way.

PG: To elevate another historical epoch to the dignity of our own epoch.PB: Yes, precisely, and ultimately asking our contemporaries to learn how strange they

would seem seen from another epoch.PG: This is an exercise to imagine Augustine writing a book about Peter Brown.PB: Our students will have to go out in a wider world, which will not always prove very

malleable. The ability of people in America itself to not know how the other half of America thinks is just remarkable. Any modern election result shows, no matter how much we may wring our hands, we don’t have detailed knowledge about our country and this can be infinitely extended. In a large country this is tremendously important.You asked me if I believe in the republic of letters. I believe in it ferociously. I believe in it because of the origins of the republic of letters, which is that people don’t necessarily agree with each other. We delude ourselves on this issue: we are going through a phase of groups and nations drifting towards each other. A point you raised very well was the issue on emigration, that we are going to live in a very delocalized world.30 The republic of letters happened in a Europe which was profoundly divided, as a way to rekindle it. It gained a lot of its weight in the twentieth century, because of the world wars. It is not an innocent creation; it is an attempt to jump over something. I hope that we don’t have to jump over such horrendous things, but there must be an awareness that one has to jump. Learning languages is a way to jump over. We have to keep the human race together against strong centrifugal tendencies, which are ever stronger the less we are aware of it.

PG: So, you do ask your students to learn languages?PB: I am sharper on students who don’t learn French, German or Russian than on those

who don’t manage to learn Latin or Greek. Latin and Greek are difficult languages and one cannot expect a young person to learn them at once, but not to partake in the European discourse on the different issues is a real miss. It comes to treat a culture as a real joining. Here again the rather Tory romanticism comes out. When you’re reading a Frenchman, you’re not reading Herodotus. When you are reading

30 Brown refers here to Petre Guran’s response to Antonis Liakos’ talk: “The Long Debate on The Book of Daniel: Comments on Utopian and Historical Thinking,” given at Princeton University’s Program in Hellenic Studies, March 10, 2006.


Marrou,31 you’re reading a Catholic Frenchman, when you’re reading Harnack32 it is something totally different.

PG: Although with a Frenchman you might always encounter his protest against the qualification “Catholic,” H.-I. Marrou is a successful blend of a pure and meticulous historian with a concerned Catholic.

PB: I wanted to say the mark is... It is important for students to catch a culture. They have to be put up to a constant obligation. Otherwise one is simply training very intelligent robots.

PG: What I discovered with joy, with enthusiasm, about your students is, above their intellectual strength, their human quality.

PB: Oh, yes I am very fortunate. PG: You are not only conveying method and knowledge to your students, but also an

academic style, are you not?PB: Yes and no. I feel very strongly about academic styles. Bullies and pedants I

detest. My experience is that there are certain optimal facilitating environments for intellectual work. I remember my own graduate days, the most of the time I was miserable. I received no guidance whatsoever in a university which took it for granted, in the best English way, that once you get your first-class degree brilliantly, you just have to wait and you will show it. It just promoted conformism, lack of imagination. There are good ways of setting an academic environment and bad ways. Very often a hyper-professionalism or hyper-perfectionism can be disastrous. By the same token an “anything goes” feeling, lacking real criticism and debate, is also bad. To get the ideal mixture is not evident. Petre, you came in at a very fortunate time, this doesn’t happen all the time. It is just like weather on a mountain side. At any moment the weather can change.

PG: So, I arrived on sunshine.PB: When I first came to Princeton, I didn’t like the graduate students. They came

from Ivy League schools and felt totally entitled. This was the time of hyper-feminism, which did some good things, which did not do good things for my graduate students, because anyone who was a woman just felt so entitled, that any

31 Henri-Irénée Marrou was a French historian of Christianity and Late Antiquity whose work was a very early influence on Brown. Cf. Saint Augustin et la fin de la culture antique ; Décadence romaine ou antiquité tardive ?, collection “Points Histoire” (Paris, Le Seuil, 1977) (posthumusly published); Crise de notre temps et réflexion chrétienne (1930-1975) (Paris, Beauchesne, 1978) (posthumusly published).

32 Adolf von Harnack (1851-1930), German Protestant theologian, church historian, and organizer of scientific research in Germany, author of Geschichte der altchristlichen Literatur, 3 Bde (Leipzig 1893-1904); Das Wesen des Christentums (Leipzig 1900); Marcion . Das Evangelium vom fremden Gott (Leipzig 1921) (2. Aufl. 1924).


criticism was treated as being sexist. There were very charismatic women-professors who wanted all the good students and could guarantee them jobs because of their networks. That was basically supporting spoiled kids. Had it been for men it would have been just as bad. We really have changed from that. It took hard work, but also what Augustine would call mere felicitas, good luck, and one just hopes so. Behind this there is a strong feeling that there is such a thing like democracy in a university, of a rather guarded elitist sort, the British sort, but this is a supremely important value. It can’t be the only value, because one does know that there are other countries with very different academic structure and one simply has to ask oneself: what are the conditions of freedom. No one environment is the guarantee of freedom. We in America have been extremely fortunate, but we have had to work hard, and we may not have been so lucky, you know, as the weather on the mountain. As long as young people are free to think what they think is true, that is a very old fashioned thing to say, things are on the good path.That’s were the republic of letters is terribly important, that does mean inter-visibility between people irrespective of the academic structures they come out from. Ultimately scripta manent, it doesn’t matter whether you come from the CNRS or from the most rigid Russian academic background, ultimately you’re part of the same dialog.

PG: You mean celebrity is not produced by Princeton; it is at best received by Princeton.PB: Something like this.PG: I had the feeling throughout my two years in Princeton, that any moment spent

in your presence was a fragment of an ongoing paideia. I was delighted to have this dialog with you, Professor Brown; I feel it is like a crowning of my time in Princeton. Thank you very much.

faith and community around the mediterranean in honor of

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