Interview Peter Brown

Peter Brown, historicus tussen twee werelden

De historicus Peter Robert Lamont Brown (1935) groeide op in Ierland en studeerde middeleeuwse geschiedenis in Oxford, alwaar hij onder toezicht van de oudhistoricus Arnoldo Momigliano promoveerde. Reeds 16 jaar is Brown hoogleraar in de Verenigde Staten, aanvankelijk in Berkeley en sinds 1986 aan Princeton University. Zijn werkterrein is de late Oudheid, ruwweg de periode van de derde tot de zevende eeuw, waarin de pagane Romeinse wereld ge-leidelijk werd omgevormd tot een christelijke wereld. Op 30 september 1994 reikte de Koninklijke Akademie van Wetenschappen hem de Amsterdamse prijs voor Historische Wetenschap (de Heineken-prijs) uit, vanwege het uit-zonderlijk belang van zijn oeuvre voor de kennis van en het inzicht in de Europese geschiedenis.

Brown benadrukt in zijn werk dat de laat-antieke wereld meer is dan een overgangsperiode tussen de Oudheid en de Middeleeuwen en hij streeft ernaar het eigen karakter van dit tijdvak tot zijn recht te laten komen (The world of late antiquity. AD 150-750 (Londen 1971)). Hij betoogt dat deze periode wordt gekenmerkt door een verschuiving in de religieuze mentaliteit. Het 'heilige' wordt niet meer gelocaliseerd in objecten en instituties, maar in een persoonlijke God (Augustine of Hippo. A biography (Londen 1967)), of heilige personen (The making of late Antiquity (Cambridge, Mass. 1978) en The cult of saints. lts rise and function in Latin Christianity (Chicago 1981)). Deze verschuiving in de religieuze mentaliteit hangt op zijn beurt weer samen met soortgelijke veranderingen in de maatschappij (vergelijk ook de titel van de verzamelbundel Society and the holy in late Antiquity (Berkeley 1982)).

In Browns vroege werk wordt het 'heilige' sociaal-functioneel bena-derd. Onder invloed van sociale antropologen als bijvoorbeeld Mary Douglas, concentreert Brown zich op de vraag waarom het sacrale nuttig was voor bepaalde groepen. Zijn recente studies Body and society. Men, women, and sexual renunciation in early Christianity (New York 1988), Power and persuasion in late Antiquity. Towards a Christian empire (University of Wisconsin Press 1992) en Authority and the sacred. Aspects of the Christiani-sation of the Roman world (Cambridge, Mass. 1995) neigen meer naar de mentaliteitsgeschiedenis. De vraag naar het sociale nut van het heilige is hier vervangen door de vraag hoe de mensen aan hun intrinsieke notie van heilig-heid kwamen.

facetten van het laat-antieke leven worden door hem bestudeerd om tot een zo getrouw mogelijke weergave te komen. Browns interdisciplinaire aanpak in combinatie met zijn literaire talent 'bring back life to a dead society'.

Your post-graduate work was supervised by professor Momigliano. Would you consider him to be a great influence in your work?

Yes, although more as an example than as a direct influence, for many of the things that interest me did not interest him. For me two characteristics of Amoldo Momigliano's work stand out. To understand the sort of influence he had, one must remember how extremely parochial ancient history was as normally practised in England. Instead, Momigliano preached a sense of non parochialism and stood for an European-wide commitment to the historiograp-hy of classical studies. He insisted that classical studies were more than simply looking at texts in order to decide the truth of what they said. He insisted that use of and problems concerning these texts had been part of European culture since at least the Renaissance period. The other thing that was terribly important, of course, was that he took Judaism and the Ancient Near East seriously. That was something which I deeply appreciated in him and which was, to be absolutely frank, very rare.

It has often been noticed that the work of the anthropologist Mary Douglas had a profound influence on your work. Do you agree and how would you describe her influence?

At a crucial time she had a great influence on me. It is an influence which has waned, I fhink, but that does not mean that I do not feel extremely grateful for what happened. She showed me how to use the type of rather formal ideologically determined évidence for the religious history of the late Roman period, how to décode it in such a way as to posit the social context for it. Her notion of symbolism, of the importance of boundaries, of purity and danger, of the sacred, meant that I started reading a late Roman text with a quest for the social boundaries that were involved in the notion of the sacred. This is an example of how the work of an anthropologist, who studies day to day societies that make use of complex symbolic Systems, can help the historian, who after all has mere fragments from a very distant past.

Your work can be labelled very descriptive. It - Iiterary - offers a vision of the past and strives, to speak with J.Z. Smith, to imagine religion. Do you have a particular end in view with this style of writing?

envision behind the évidence. I think that is important also because, as a historian, I have never been very interested in causation. Of course one has to understand what causes things, what causes change, otherwise it is an indul-gence - but I have always noticed that a true and accurate description is much more revealing.

People have often asked themselves 'why did Christianity win?'. Do you think that is a good question or is it too difficult?

Quite frankly my own scholarly interest is not so much 'why did Christianity win?', but 'what is the form Christianity takes when it apparently wins?'. In asking why did Christianity win, you have to be extremely careful of the région. Furthermore, there is an enormous danger of choosing a too obvious explanation. I think part of the reason for this is that Christians of the time were overconfident in why they had won. We as modern scholars tend to simply secularize their explanations. Early Christians offer their explanations on the supernatural plain and we somehow take them up. We do not admit their supernatural believes to be historical. We tend to take a, what I would call, layesized version. When one says, for instance, 'Christians love each other', this means something very different in the Epistle of saint James to what it might mean to somebody studying the formation of associative groups. We always translate the one into the other.

You have explained the role of demons in early Christianity along sociolo-gical and psycholosociolo-gical Unes. Does the aforesaid mean that your idea about the functioning of demons has changed in the course of time?

Yes. On the other hand, one has to make a beginning in understanding phenomena. What I would now ask myself, is why this phenomenon received such great emphasis in late Antiquity. Even if you have explained it satisfacto-rily you still have to ask: in reality, was exorcism a normal means of cure? That is, you have to ask quantitative questions as well as qualitative questions and there I think I myself would tend nowadays not to overemphasize exor-cism as necessarily a universally widespread phenomenon. But I would still emphasize it as a phenomenon which was highly meaningful to those who certainly believed it happened, who preserved memories of it. It is just like nowadays; most cars reach their destination when they drive, but there are car accidents. The things we think about are car accidents.

You have stressed again and again that labels like 'the décline of rationali-ty' or 'popular religion' are not fit to explain the process of change in late Antiquity. Could you expand upon that?

should only include what we want to include. This is the constant vice of all historians who tend to look for general cultural stereotypes of an age. There I have always felt that the period of the end of the Roman Empire, precisely because we tend to like this empire, has been tremendously idealized. That is the long-term reason which leads me to be critical of those forms of explanati-on. There is a real need to cleanse our own imaginations when thinking of the past.

In my short-term answer I come back to my notion that a phenomenon has to be correctly described before it can be explained. I think the historian always has to deal with change. He may describe an age very liberally, but he always has an interest in why that age changed into another age. He therefore has to be sure that he describes the phenomena right. Otherwise he may be looking at totally wrong explanations. For example, there was a very good review of Ramsay MacMullen's book and articles on magic and his view of the general decline of rationality. The review rightly points out that what really matters is not that there is more sorcery in the late Roman Empire, but that it is organized, is written down and put into codices. So what are you describing; are you describing a growth of irrationality, or are you describing a growth of the wish to organize useful knowledge? A society which in fact seems to have a great wish to organize knowledge at the cost of control, is a society very different from one which is purely irrational or purely anxious. You are actually describing different phenomena which must be explained in a different way.

You have stated in your book The cult of saints that many of the people who were converted to Christianity were very anxious. For this reason they looked for a new patron, the saint. Do you think their anxiety came to an end when they had found their patron saint?

M y own instinct is that it probably did. I do not quite know if this is so, but I would say that the world of saint Gregory of Tours, Merovingian Gaul, is a violent world, but is not an anxious world. People knew what they could do and what to expect. Their intelligible universe was very firm and very fixed. When something went wrong, they knew what happened, why it happened and what to do about it. Again our notion of the 'dark age' is profoundly wrong in that sense.

Was this already the case in late Antiquity?

The special flavour of late Antiquity was the claim of certain human beings to have a special relation with God. How does this relationship differ from the relationships with the gods in late paganism, from Lucian with Isis for example?

I think one should not make the distinction too clear. However, what strikes me very much is the extent of the claim of the permanency of the Christian relationship - whether it is Augustine's doctrine of predestination, or the claim that someone like saint Simeon Stylites is capable of representing the angels for sixty years on end. In the still predominantly polytheistic society of late antiquity people could indeed attain a state of closeness to the gods, but it always strikes me as a more erratic closeness. I also think that the Christians based their claims of closeness on an ascetic regime which by definition excluded married people, active politicians and generals. Hereby they gave this form of sanctity a separate role in society. In this sense, Constantine who could believe that he was close to God and could win battles, is a much more ancient person than saint Anthony.

You make a distinction between the holy man in the Latin world and the saint in the eastern world. What caused this difference?

Well, looking back on it, do not forget I said this in about 1975, some 20 years ago. I think I would now say that the difference may be that the diffe-rent societies place diffediffe-rent emphasis on what they remembered. That is, I am increasingly struck by the fact that hermits, holy men, living in the woods, living out on the edge of the world, did exist in western Europe, but are not remembered. It is like astronomical photography; blue coloured stars shine very bright and red coloured stars appear very dull because of the two different colours. I think that hermits in the west are sort of dull coloured. They did not attract social memory of the people who wrote this down.

The cult of images that rose in the east is quoted by you as another big difference between eastern and western Christianity. You have linked the cult of images with the cult of saints. Can you expand upon that?

Seeing the holy man is good for you. I think that is what the beginning was. The actual ability of that means that when you see a holy man, you see God come down among men, God made available. So in a sense, the holy man is himself an image. He is often spoken of as an icon. The little painted portrait people took home after they visited a saint brought about the same intense feeling of his presence. The issue is not art. It is about spiritual presence. Both the cult of saints and the cult of images are based upon the conviction that there are links between visible phenomena and God, whether it is a visible holy person or a visible painted piece of wood. In this belief there is no chasm between God and man.

There is an enormous difference with the western view. Augustine, in his notion of signs, insists that human language is a totally human creation. God gives very few signs directly. Most signs are mediation by human agreement and are therefore subject to human doubt and human uncertainty. When the Carolingian writers on images pick up Augustine's notion of signs it means they simply cannot have a world filled with reliable signs of something beyond it. Western Latin Christianity in this period is characterised by a very real transcendentalism, a lack of interest in the intermediate links between God and man. This Christianity does not have a theory of delegated presence. This, of course, leads to a tremendous intimacy, exemplified in Augustine's Confes-sions.

In contrast, eastern Christianity maintained a great faith in the visible universe as a sign of God. The cosmos was the greatest icon of all, and the holy man, the icon, and the sacraments were all just simply parts of a huge and complex communication system. What interests me enormously, is that when Augustine was writing his Confessions, Ruphines was translating Origin's Te ta kippes. That is, Latin writers could have known Origin and his cosmic vision, but they decided not to pay any attention. People in the west plainly wanted to see the world in terms of real intention, human kind, society, God, without a sort of cosmos in between.

Do you think of the rise of images in the eastern Church as a fall back, as a decline of a spiritual Christianity?

You have used art as an illustration of the mentality of the people of the age. Suddenly, in the late third century, frontality comes up as an artistic device. What does this tell about the mentality of the age?

This is something which has always fascinated me and which got me into the whole subject. The art of the period is in some ways one of the things which a modern person, who does not share classical taste in art, has more in common with than perhaps any other area of his or her culture. As for the rise of frontality, it has often been stated that the people wanted to make value judgements about the human soul and looked for its mirror. Hence the enormous importance of the facial expression and the great big eyes. That is something one has always known. What strikes me, apart from this, is the enormous 'professionalism' of this frontal portraiture. People look what their vocation is. A man who is called to be a philosopher must look like a philos-opher. A man who is believed to be a saint has to look like a saint. A n emperor is now instantly recognised by his robe, his diadem. It is a world where people like to feel that if they see somebody in the street they know exactly who he or she is. People did not like ambiguity. They wanted people to look clear. I think the earlier Roman period was much more undifferentia-ted. Seneca, for example, could be a philosopher and a politician. Without the inscription 'Seneca' on some of those busts, you would not know that it was Seneca, for it does not look like a philosopher but like a middle-aged man. What is shown in these frontal portraits is the tremendous sense that people are their role to which they have in some ways been called.

Does this imply that you do not agree with Weitzmann's characterisation of the period as an 'age of spirituality' in the catalogue of the exhibition of the same name in the Metropolitan Museum?

In The body and society you have described the period of late Antiquity as a time in which the sexual moral changed drastically. Do you think that this can be used as a characterisation of the period?

I think so... This is a book for which I knew I could have written a whole other book had I studied the next Century. I think what happens and what one is always doing with late Antiquity, is that one is trying to define it as a period, determine what makes it distinctive. I think one is actually allowed to do that. Simply to say that it is a time of decline does not define it. Therefore you have to look for other définitions. One of the astonishing things was the way in which forms of ascetic renunciation were used at this precise moment to spark off an extraordinary powerful debate on what human beings could do, what they should do, what was natural and what was unnatural. This is what makes the ascetic renunciation of this period interesting and distinctive.

Had I gone on, and studied the sixth and seventh centuries, I would have emphasised even more the specific connotations of female virginity. What I still think one has to explain in the transition from the late antique to the medieval period is that female virginity does not hold the same symbolic power in the fourth Century as it does at the end of the sixth Century. This is still something which is not easy to understand totally. As the church gets more sacramental, men as priests have a great monopoly on sacramental power. Only a mass set by a priest can deliver soul purgatory and therefore the prayers of pious women technically cannot do that or do that as well. On the other hand there is the undertone of the huge idéalisation of the woman's virgin state. Often, the true holy persons or saints in the Anglo-Saxon Kingdom and the Merovingian Kingdom are the great women. That sort of imaginative rearrangement is something which a late antique historian does not have to deal with but that the true picture of sexuality and renunciation that goes into the Middle Ages ought to deal with.

Do you think there was a discrepancy between the way people wrote about the human body and their actual behaviour?

I suspect so, yes. Though one cannot make too great a distinction, since we know how much our own image of the body, which is itself determined by our culture, influences how we feel and act. I got up in the morning feeling not very well today, but I have a body image which is linked to a relatively reassuring medical image that I will feel better if I take a pul. If I had a body image where the same phenomena were the resuit of an attack by a sorcerer, this pill would be of no use. Thus culturally mediated body images and the existing thérapies go together.

and contrary to our modern age. Most interestingly, it is at odds with the modes of interpretation a lot of people use in dealing with these phenomena.

You wrote the biography of saint Augustine. What saying of saint Augus-tine made the greatest impression on you?