An Historian's History

Peter Brown. Journeys of the Mind: A Life in History. New York: Princeton University Press, 2023. 736 pp, $45

Saint Augustine, Peter Brown, and I gathered at a cozy coffee shop on Princeton’s Nassau Street most evenings in the spring of 1999. While I had a coffee in hand and comfortably nestled in a leather chair, St. Augustine shared wisdom on shaping my loves for God. Peter’s warm voice and thoughtful tone drew me in as he unraveled the context, narrative, and theological concerns of this great Doctor of the Church. In those magical late hours, we became fast friends.

Well, almost.

Dr. Brown was somewhere else in Princeton living his life. Augustine was, of course, interred in Pavia, Italy. These scholars may not have been with me in person, but I had their most popular books in hand. The wisdom of Augustine’s 1,600-year-old classic autobiography, Confessions, engulfed me. Brown guided my study with Augustine of Hippo, his ground-breaking Oxford thesis that jump-started a career studying Late Antiquity (250-750 AD), and which remains the seminal work on Augustine to this day. The Rollins Professor Emeritus of History at Princeton University, Brown has had a distinguished career shaped by roles at Oxford University, the University of London, and the University of California, Berkeley. A long-standing fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Medieval Academy of America, and the American Philosophical Society, he is widely recognized for establishing the academic field of Late Antiquity, redefining it within the framework of Western Civilization studies.

Through numerous lectureships, fourteen influential books, and extensive teaching, Brown transformed Augustinian studies and deepened our understanding of late Roman and early Byzantine society. His work illuminates the intersections of religious life and the cultural dynamics where East meets West, leaving an enduring legacy in historical scholarship.

No surprise, then, that Prof. Kristi Upson-Saia, Gamble Professor in Religion at Occidental College, told me she considers Brown to be “a giant in the field of late ancient studies.” His influence is most pronounced, she told me, in scholarly conversations about monasticism, “‘the holy man,’ the body, wealth and poverty, and Bishop Augustine of Hippo.” 

Detours and Deconstruction

Brown’s Journeys of the Mind: A Life in History (Princeton University Press), much like the man himself, defies traditional literary categories. Seamlessly blending autobiography and history, it offers a narrative as engaging as it is profound. True to the essence of a good memoir, Journeys of the Mind draws readers into the heart of Brown’s intellectual and personal experiences.

His creativity shines as he vividly describes antiquity, taking readers on fascinating detours into theology, ecclesiology, monasticism, hagiography, social anthropology, the Desert Fathers, Zoroastrian fire rituals, and Syriac poetry. Beyond its exploration of history, the book serves as a veritable “who’s who” of 20th-century humanities scholarship. Brown recounts encounters with intellectual luminaries such as C.S. Lewis, Billy Graham, Elizabeth Anscombe, Charles Taylor, Dimitri Obolensky, Robin Zaehner, and others, enriching the narrative with his unparalleled breadth of knowledge and experience.

The friend who recommended it to me described it as “the telling of one man’s intellectual journey interwoven with the development of a whole academic discipline.” He commented, “Rare does an academic’s memoir captivate, and rarer still does it educate. Brown captures the imagination and teaches us all yet again.”

I couldn’t agree more. 

Brown wastes no time demonstrating his method of historical inquiry in Journeys of the Mind. He plunges readers into mid-century Ireland, the landscape of his childhood, where the resilient Irish character and the complexities of his family life deeply influenced him. Through vivid storytelling, Brown relays the Protestant-Catholic tensions that shaped his worldview and motivated his lifelong study of religion and history. His personal history becomes the palette from which he paints his discoveries in antiquity and his creation of a new academic discipline.

Brown’s narrative is refreshingly unsanitized. He does not present himself as a detached academic, safely distant from matters of faith. Instead, he candidly describes the religion of his youth as “unfamiliar tracts of history, often buried beneath a mound of modern prejudice.” He blends his religious upbringing with a young boy’s “respect for common sense and for the beneficent power of institutions… across the sea in England.” Both institutions and religion serve as enduring guideposts for his academic pursuits.

At Oxford, Brown grapples with his career trajectory. Should he become a scholar who thrives on intellectual conflict and values agnostic rigor? Or should he follow the path of C.S. Lewis—whom Brown heard lecture twice but never met—whose “gifts as an apologist for Christianity grew out of a supreme confidence in traditional values and beliefs, nourished by his teaching and idyllic moments among like-minded friends”? Brown ultimately chooses a synthesis of the two: a faith-inspired scholar who approaches the medieval era with professional agnosticism and intellectual honesty. This balance defines his career and the discipline he pioneered. Faith does not stain or skew his work, but, as his autobiography demonstrates, faith fuels his pursuit of truth. 

Charm and Challenge

Future historians won’t need to read between the lines with Brown—he takes us directly into his personal struggles, doubts, and very human experiences. The “problem of the historical origins of the Catholic Church,” as he describes them, motivates young Brown to shift his study from the medieval world to Late Antiquity. He recalls:

My religious worries of the previous year had dissipated. I was not embittered by that crisis. I was disposed to sit back for a time, so as to enjoy Christianity as a historical phenomenon.

By way of example, he recounts feeling “an utter ignoramus” during his first years at All Souls College in Oxford, with his strongest memory one “of aching ignorance” while researching the later Roman Empire. This radical honesty is a gift to budding historians and outsiders like myself, who often wrestle with imposter syndrome when treading in the world of letters.

Brown’s narrative also includes delightful anecdotes that bring his younger self to life. We meet a rambunctious student scaling the walls of Merton College, traversing its rooftops, and bowing theatrically to his peers watching from their windows. Moments like this are both endearing and reminiscent of Augustine’s own youthful indiscretions. Yet, unlike Augustine, Brown’s mischief is always tempered by his gentlemanly charm, leaving readers smiling at the similarities between the historian and his subject.

The scope of Brown’s academic research is remarkably wide—disparate, some might say. Yet this very breadth is what makes his scholarship groundbreaking. Unlike many historians who devote their careers to exploring a single historical topic, person, or place, Brown ranges across subjects as varied as Sasanian Zoroastrianism and Christian saints. In doing so, he challenges contemporary scholarly assumptions about Late Antiquity and the medieval era, while pioneering a new approach to historical studies.

Central to Brown’s work is a deconstruction of the Eurocentric narrative that views history as an inevitable march toward progress and enlightenment, a perspective that reached its height during European (and particularly British) imperialism. Reflecting on his final published article during his time at Oxford, Brown describes it as:

… something of a manifesto against the European exceptionalism that was implicit in many narratives of the Western Middle Ages. This view seemed to imply that Europe had a monopoly of rationality and progress; and that its more ancient neighbors in Byzantium and the Islamic world had somehow missed out, because they had not passed through the changes that occurred in the privileged West.

Brown was, in many ways, a product of his time. The mid-20th century deconstruction movement, with its emphasis on revealing and destabilizing hierarchies and accepted narratives, profoundly influenced intellectual circles, including historical scholarship. While Brown avoids the more abstract tendencies of philosophical deconstructionism, he applies its spirit to his work, questioning rigid boundaries and assumptions about the past.

Assumptions and Ambiguity

Brown anchors his research in scientifically verifiable evidence, employing a methodology that encourages both his peers and readers to critically deconstruct conventional narratives and reconstruct them with greater nuance. His approach to history is marked by an openness that acknowledges the inevitability of future revisions and deeper insights. For Brown, history is not a fixed story but an evolving dialogue shaped by ongoing inquiry and discovery.

For instance, Brown dismantles the academy's traditional dichotomy between paganism and doctrinally sound Christians of the third and fourth centuries. Instead, he proposes fluid categories of individuals and their confessions of faith, interacting in unexpected and dynamic ways. By shifting focus from prototypical models of faith to marginalized groups such as the poor, women, and ascetics, Brown reframes the narrative to embrace complexity. His writing resists reductive interpretations, embracing the ambiguity of human behavior, social structures, and religious practices. This reflects a deconstructive perspective that rejects definitive or singular meanings.

Brown’s scholarly journey is often imbued with adventure. In one notable example, he recalls flying over the Persian Gulf in the late 1970s while contributing to the BBC documentary series The Long Search. During this project, he arranged to remain in Iran to visit the dwindling Zoroastrian communities. This exploration led him to challenge conventional scholarly timelines, particularly the presumed association between the rise of Islam in the Sasanian Empire (beginning in 633 AD) and the abrupt end of Zoroastrianism. Brown argues that Zoroastrian decline was a gradual process of erosion, paving the way for Islam’s organic and decreed growth. He critiques the simplistic attribution of religious transitions to decisive battles like Al-Qadisiyyah (636 AD) or Nahavand (642 AD), urging a more nuanced understanding that resists sweeping historical explanations.

A final gift Brown offers the discipline of historic inquiry is the cross-disciplinary lens he uses. He purposefully blends methods traditionally associated with medieval studies into his exploration of Late Antiquity. For example, he applies anthropological tools to analyze the Register of Varad, an historic text previously examined only through the disciplinary perspectives of history and literature. This and other  “sideways” approaches to well-studied events, places, and figures bring a vibrant, technicolored texture to the past, revealing new dimensions of understanding.

Brown persistently challenges the academic status quo, urging scholars to reconsider their assumptions and methodologies. He unsettles entrenched narratives with probing questions, such as:

So why had it ended? Was it really because twelfth-century persons became more rational? No. It was because the state grew stronger.

But was this really how it happened?

But was Pirenne right?

Brown challenges premises and pushes his peers back to look again at their findings. In doing so, we begin to see the implications and benefits of the retake, the questioning, and an interdisciplinary approach. 

Wit and Wisdom

Beyond interesting observations in history and defining new methods for study, Brown’s dearest achievement in Journeys of the Mind is how he describes the idyllic world of a British scholar. Many of his passages bring to mind Lewis’ and Tolkien’s visits at the Eagle and the Child, or the vet’s visit to the nearby farm in James Herriott’s classic memoir All Creatures Great and Small. Brown writes: 

The fields, villages, and ancient churches of Oxfordshire offered a direct way into the past, as it had done for me when I first cycled around Shropshire with Laurence Le Quesne. They kept me in touch with the continuous history of England from the last days of Roman Britain onward, as I made my way around an ancient landscape, whose roots reached back - layer after layer - to the later empire?

One final vignette illustrates the humor and poignancy of a British don discovering a new world when his career takes him to California: 

There is a lot to be said for dinner jackets and candlelight as equalizers. Far from being marks of antiquated privilege, dinner jackets had a leveling effect. I was reminded of this function in the late 1970s. Having moved to Berkeley, I decided that I would no longer need my dinner jacket - my tuxedo. It was not a very glorious piece of clothing. I had bought it at Oxfam for only five pounds. But I had used it regularly for weekend dining in All Souls. When I arrived in California, it seemed out of place in the more democratic atmosphere of the West Coast. I left it on a bench in People’s Park, for some lucky vagrant to appropriate. But as I looked up at a powder-blue sky at the far end of the world, I was surprised to feel a twinge of regret. I realized that the dinner jacket had been both a symbol of collegiality and the means by which unaffected courtesy could be extended by the old to the young.

Brown’s Journeys of the Mind is a courtesy to all of us - an offer of wit and wisdom from author to reader. Within its pages we encounter a very human Brown, whose academic path resembles the steady and deliberate journey of a common man rather than the dramatic arc of a fearless pioneer or accidental genius. Yet, his work is undeniably groundbreaking, and his genius has reshaped entire disciplines of study.

What makes Brown’s narrative so compelling is his humility and self-awareness. His understanding of himself and his calling encourages readers to recognize the greatness in their own everyday journeys. Journeys of the Mind goes beyond recounting an academic life or exploring the questions that fueled his work. By sharing his faith origins, his inquisitive spirit, and his bold break with tradition, Brown offers us something deeper—a true “journey of the heart,” and an invitation to bring a similar rigorous curiosity to our own.