Synopses & Reviews
Review
"'Late antiquity witnessed the transition from one model of society, in which the poor were largely invisible, to another, in which they came to play a vivid imaginative role.' It is the burden of this elegantly written and thoughtful book to explore the possible explanations for this transition. Brown seeks an answer to it in the changing nature of political life, broadly construed, in the late antique world. It was the Christian bishops, a new social force rising to prominence in the 3rd to 5th centuries, who capitalized on the concern for the poor expressed in the Jewish and Christian traditions and made of that concern a platform for claiming an obligation to care for all the weak in society—an obligation which also gave them a functional place in the political ecology of the time. In thus reaching for a place in the politics of their day, the bishops in part inadvertently encouraged the reimagining of society away from a picture of people as organized into those who were citizens of a city, and all those outside the semi-security of that group, and toward a picture of people as organized in distinct classes, divided and united by a 'language of claims' that the poor have on the wealthy. Thus the understanding we have of society—as divided between upper, middle, and lower classes—is itself a product of a vast reimagination of society that occurred, in no small part accidentally, in this era. It ends with the fascinating suggestion that the great Christological
controversies may themselves be equally rooted in (though not determined by) similar socio-political changes as well. A fascinating study of unintended consequences." Reviewed by Andrew Witmer, Virginia Quarterly Review (Copyright 2006 Virginia Quarterly Review)
Synopsis
In three magisterial essays, Peter Brown, one of the world's foremost scholars of the society and culture of late antiquity, explores the emergence in late Roman society of the poor as a distinct social class, one for which the Christian church claimed a special responsibility. It is the story of how a society came to see itself as responsible for the care of a particular class of people -- a class that had not previously been cared for -- and of who benefited from that shift in interests.
In his characteristically elegant and lucid prose, Brown seeks to recover the pre-Christian status of poor people, the actual nature of the relations between the Christian church and the poor, and the true motivations -- sometimes sincere, sometimes self-serving -- behind Christian rhetoric of love for the poor. He draws not only on the standard Greek and Latin sources for the later Roman Empire, but also on Jewish sources to document the interactions between Middle Eastern provincial societies and classical Roman traditions. Brown gracefully illuminates a crucial transition from classical to Christian culture: the emergence of a new understanding of what society -- and the Church -- owes to the poor that continues to resonate.
Synopsis
Three lectures, presented by Peter Brown in Jerusalem in May 2000 in memory of Menahem Stern, which examine public and private perceptions of the poor during the Christian Church's rise to dominance between 300 and 600 AD. At this time the novel concept of love of the poor' was becoming an expected virtue and both Jews and Christians developed highly organised methods of caring for the poor. Brown traces the origin of this public virtue, making comparisons with the pagan past, and looks at the role of bishops and the interaction of state and citizens in the eastern Roman empire.