Through the Eye of a Needle: Wealth, the Fall of Rome, and the Making of Christianity in the West, 350-550 AD

This is a searching and authoritative study of how early Christianity dealt with the problem of wealth. The scriptural position taken literally was uncompromising. It was harder for a rich person to enter heaven than for a camel to pass through the eye of the needle (Matthew 19:24). The rich were enjoined to given their wealth away and live a life of poverty. Brown in his work explores how Christian thinkers dealt with these teachings in a situation when many rich people began joining the Church, especially towards the end of the fourth century ACE when the religion had established itself as the dominant faith supported by the Imperial State.The narrative begins with the socio-economic context of the Fourth Century ACE. The century rather than being a period of decline was one of innovation and renewal when the Roman economy was newly monetised. The gold solidus introduced under Constantine proved to be a remarkably stable and long lasting currency which facilitated robust economic activity and the accumulation in specie of large fortunes. Although the basis of wealth remained land, the rich were able to convert agricultural wealth into gold. The top decile of Roman society comprising a small number of super rich and larger numbers of moderately wealthy were the beneficiaries of these favourable conditions and formed the imperial elite comprising both Italians and wealthy provincials, many of whom were "new men" who depended on and rose to social prominence and wealth as a result of imperial service and honours. Power for them was readily converted into wealth. It was in this context that the Christian Church of the Fourth century found itself. At the time of the conversion of Constantine, the Church's social base lay amongst town folk from the middle levels of society. They were not the poorest but reasonably well off middling people, often skilled craftsmen, teachers and other urban service providers of modest to comfortable means. By contrast, the aristocracy in general remained pagan. It was after about the 370s once the religion had established itself as the religion favoured by the State that the rich began joining the Church and the religion began to assume the character of a majority religion. These changes were encouraged also by the "gentle violence" of the Christian Imperial Court, although it officially maintained a policy of neutrality in matters of religion until the end of the Fourth Century. Against this background, rich men without any prior training or Christian background began to obtain the role of bishop, including Ambrose of Milan. These developments also accompanied a new vigour amongst the leaders of the Church directed against whom they saw as their enemies, both pagans and non-Nicene Christians, bringing to an end the era of toleration of the reigns of Constantine and his sons.The uses and abuses of wealth engaged the attention and interest of both pagan and Christian elites. Concepts of charitable giving found expression in both traditions as obligations on the part of the wealthy to share their wealth with others. Both traditions also took a hostile position towards or at least discomfort with the idle rich. For the pagan historian Ammianus Marcellinus, the sad contrast was between the supposed frugality and virtue of the past exemplified by the Republic and the excesses of his own time, attributable especially to the new money associated with the Constantine era when imperial officials were able to make huge fortunes. One form of pagan giving was the endowment of public buildings and putting on of games for the civic population. This was wealth that the Church however taught would be better directed at donations to the Church and poor relief and became an early target for Christian leaders.For Christians, their moral compass on matters of wealth and its uses came from the passages of the Old and New Testaments requiring the rich and powerful to do justice to the poor (eg in the book of Isaiah) and specific injunctions of Jesus for the rich to give what they had to the poor in return for a reward in the afterlife. This view of giving took the form of a commercial transaction which may appear odd and distasteful to a modern sensibility. The Christian view of the proper uses of wealth in the end prevailed in favour of pagan concepts of public endowment and largesse, with the Church itself receiving gifts from rich donors which it in turn was supposed to apply for the benefit of the poor.The narrative at this point turns to the lives of five prominent men of the era. The first is Symmachus, the pagan magnate who witnesses the decline of the old religion and an increasing numbers of aristocrats becoming Christians. Their wealth "slipped into the hand of the church".Ambrose of Milan who is the second subject represents the new phenomenon of a Christian Bishop for the first time entering the circles of power to influence the policies of the Imperial Court. He also represents a new confident type of Churchman who ushers in the ascendancy of Nicene Christianity over its rivals, both Christian and Non-Christian. This new power is underpinned in part by the ability to bring the crowd onto the street to get one's way and even to take on the power of the Emperor (perhaps foreshadowing the conflicts between Church and State during the Middle Ages).Ambrose importantly, argued for a sense of human solidarity, bringing the poor within the one human community rather than as outsiders receiving charity from those who saw fit to give. He said that it "is not anything of yours that you are bestowing on the poor; rather, you are giving back something of theirs. For you alone are usurping what was given in common for the use of all. The earth belongs to everyone, not to the rich". The view put forward by Ambrose stood in contrast to the Classical view that distinguished between citizens (who alone were entitled to the Annona or corn dole and giving by the rich) to the exclusion of non-citizens, often rural refugees surviving on the margins. This change bringing all within the community of "God's people" represents a key transformation in Late Antiquity.The narrative then moves to consider the life of St Augustine. Augustine did not come from a wealthy background so that for him, poverty may have been something close to the bone. He did not speak forcefully like Ambrose in favour of redistributing wealth but looked to some kind of spiritual communism in which all souls were brought together based on his reading of Plotinus - in some kind of metaphysical communion. He however did give much thought to the uses of wealth and took a high minded but "middle of the road" position that in the end prevailed.The next subject of the discussion is the late Roman nobleman Ausonius who exemplifies the life of a wealthy aristocrat through his life of consumption and otium (leisure and study) in Aquitania, a life though luxurious was based on the flimsy foundations of the Late Antiquity which would disappear in a generation when the Roman Imperial state in the West begins unravelling. Ausonius represents a Christianity that is comfortable in and with the world and with wealth, in contrast to the more high minded and austere Christianity of Augustine that followed in the next generation.The final figure Brown looks at is Paulinus of Nola. Like Ausonius, Paulinus was a Christian from the wealthiest segment of Roman society. But unlike the case of Ausonius, for Paulinus and others of the generation that followed, wealth was a "slime" to be discarded in order to access spiritual riches. Paulinus was the first Roman aristocrat known to have abandoned his estates and wealth in order to be ordained a priest and live a religious life, to the disquiet and even shock of other members of his class. He reflects the new austere spirit of Christianity and its rejection of wealth and the good life and enjoyed by the upper classes. For the aristocracy, the abandoning of wealth was shocking because it meant turning one's back on the duty that came with wealth including obligations of public service - and to be condemned as such.At the end of the period, the "poor" had come to assume the place of the old Roman plebs as the object of the munificence of the rich, and giving to the poor by the rich (usually done in a public and ostentatious manner) was seen as a way of getting through the "eye of the needle". Against this background, teachings developed arguing that the rich held their wealth on trust for the poor and by giving, achieved spiritual riches - "salvation economics". Pagans on the other hand would argue that wealth belonged to the human creator of the wealth and not held on trust for God or the poor.The entry of greater numbers of wealthy people into the Church in the later fourth century also produces greater stratification within the Christian community. Damasus and Jerome both deal with the issue in different ways. Pope Damasus encourages the rich to enter the Church to provide it with greater respectability and Jerome inspired by Syrian models encourages rich Romans to take up ascetic and chaste lives, scandalising aristocratic families when women from these families do what Jerome asks. Jerome and Churchmen of his day though wedded to a notion of personal poverty, lived in the shadow of enormously expensive libraries on which their intellectual endeavours depended presumably funded by wealthy patrons and donors, recalling perhaps Gandhi's quip that keeping him in poverty, cost his friends a fortune.The increasing flow of wealth to the Church triggered conflicts over who should get the new wealth. Pope Damasus in Rome for example objected to funds from Christians in Rome going to endowments in Palestine, believing that all donations to the Church from Roman Christians should be under his control.Two sharply different views of the use and deployment wealth emerge out of the debates of the era. Augustine urged giving by the rich to the Church, which would then use for its own benefit, for the "Holy Poor", namely the clergy - and give to the rest of the poor as it saw fit. He also preferred steady giving over time so that the Church enjoyed an assured flow of income rather than spectacular acts of giving everything away as a one off event. A more radical giving and self-impoverishment was urged by others. These differences also reflected how the rich came to be viewed. For Pelagians, the position was "tolle divitem et pauperem non inveniens" (Get rid of the rich and you will find no poor). Augustine however responded "tolle superbiam, divitiae non nocebunt" (Get rid of pride and riches will not harm).However, it was the view of Augustine which prevailed. Following the trauma of the Gothic invasions of the early Fifth century and the dislocation and insecurity of life in the period, those "whose wealth had survived the shocks of this new crisis were unlikely to feel guilty about what little was left to them". With the collapse of the Roman state in the West during the fifth century, it is the Church, supported by the increasing wealth in its hands, that steps in and assumes many of the functions of State at the regional level, anticipating the Medieval Church. Also settled by this time were concepts of charitable giving to and through the Church (as opposed to more uncompromising Pelagian concepts of abandoning wealth and pagan concepts of civic endowment) that survive into and beyond the Middle Ages.Brown's study of how Roman elites and intellectuals after the coming of Christianity addressed the question of wealth and gave effect to the teachings of the scriptures on the ownership and uses of wealth, does not however deal with how the rest of the population dealt with these questions. This indeed may be what Brown calls one of the vast areas of silence that the surviving texts do not speak to - and can only be guessed at. There is evidence of social banditry during the era - and indeed in pretty much every pre-modern society - including the Robin Hood like Christian bandits of Augustine's own time, the Circumcellions. How these groups thought about these issues can only be speculated on. Did they reject the elite concept of limited redistribution of wealth through individual donations by rich givers in favour of involuntary redistribution through banditry of what Ambrose said belonged to everyone? Did they not think about the theology very much at all and simply did what they thought they had to do to survive? In this regard, the better documented medieval period shows some insight into the groups such as the Dolcinites who did provide a theology to support their forced expropriation of the rich - and appealed directly to scripture to support their actions.However, it appears that neither the rich voluntary givers of Late Antiquity studied by Brown (and those of the Middle Ages) nor the poor who forcibly took wealth from the rich operated beyond the level of individual action or action by small groups in their local areas. The theology of Ambrose in other words did not operate as a generalised political programme driven by the State for the redistribution of wealth from the rich to the rest of the population (even if the non-conformist Pelagius and his followers may have implied such a proposition). Political programmes of this kind were generally not found in any pre-modern society (with some arguable exceptions of "State Socialism" such as the "Equal Field System" (juntian zhidu) of the Tang Dynasty in China). However, by Early Modern times in Europe, the relevant passages of scripture could and did inspire such political action pushed through by powerful states. Cromwell in dispossessing cavaliers could raise his voice in prayer to ask "Strengthen us, O God .... that many be made not poor to make a few rich" (although sadly, he did not see fit to apply the prayer in Ireland). It is hard to see that Ambrose could have conceived the passages of scripture he relied on to support his teachings on wealth working in this way to dispossess violently the rich. The rise of mass political programmes in the nineteenth century calling for the redistribution of wealth took these issues to a more intense level - with theological support for socialist programmes based on the same basal arguments known to Ambrose and his contemporaries. Karl Marx was concerned enough with these trends in theology that he specifically attacked what he called "clerical socialism" in the Communist Manifesto, anxious to stamp socialism with a resolutely secular character.The scriptural debates concerning wealth studied by Brown resonate to this day, as countries such as the United States and France debate how the upward sliding scale of taxation should or should not be used to redistribute wealth from the "1%" to the "99%". Were they to hear the theology of Sister Simone Campbell and the "Nuns on the Bus" on the justice of redistributing wealth, Ambrose and Augustine may well recognise the arguments and the difficulties in giving effect to the same uncompromising passages of scripture - even if they might find it surprising that the State had the power and the means to do so on a scale that would have been unimaginable in his day when the best they could hope for it their day would have been the voluntary practice of "salvation economics" by a few rich people. Brown's work is a valuable and thought provoking study of how an ancient society dealt with an issue that still confront societies of the 21st century, with theologians attempting to give life and meaning to the same scriptural passages in a very different setting.

When one says “ as Rome goes, so goes the world” or “Through the eye of a needle” what does that mean and what are they attempting to say? Anyone attempting to understand those remarks needs to read this book. The insight Brown delivers to the reader from the time period of 250 CE to 600 CE of the Roman Empire will enrich the seeker to find a Latin Church perspective of culture, societies, political frameworks, geography, and religious practices that information of the complexities associated with those statements. Brown provides an excellent insight to the reader to grasp the complexities and the dynamic interaction of the aforementioned attributes of the Roman Empire. The 300 years Brown covers provide the reader with a Latin Church view of the times with a hefty bibliography of scholarly writings for the reader to pursue their specific interest or continue their reading of this historical period. After this reading one will be impressed with the dynamics of this period of the Roman Empire and the evolution of the Latin Church. The book starts with a strong centralized Roman Empire at the end of the “Pax Romana” period to an evolving empire under Constantine that recognizes Christianity as a legitimate religion. This recognition is the start of a transformation of state and church within the empire. The transition begins with Christianity as a minority religion that is viewed suspiciously in Rome but by law becomes a tax exempt institution. This transition is the beginning of a powerless institution, Latin Church, who reaches out to its followers with a new form of leadership, pastoral care, that is unlike the secular institution's of wealth and power. As Brown peels away the next three hundred years the reader will find a major power shift from a centralized Roman Empire to a decentralized government form and the growth of the Latin church throughout the empire takes on various forms of expressing the pastoral care in the provincial areas of the empire. As the empire transitions by geographical areas the church with its inherited wealth over time becomes the community stabilizers in many of the larger areas of Gaul, Africa, and Brittany. This gives the Church the opportunity and ability to influence leaders in and outside the church. The church wealth came over the centuries from Roman heritage and new believers who were from, what would be identified today, as the middle class. The writings from this time show this did not work perfectly and often resulted in unpredictable outcomes for the church and communities. What Brown shows is a broad spectrum of responses to wealth and power of the church while attempting to fulfill the church mission of taking the message of Christ to the world. The historical context is complex, as Brown shows, and he addresses how wealth and power as it is institutionalized can result in good, bad, and too often ugly. The human condition to act on corrosive character at both the individual level and institutional can result in human folly to such a degree that individuals, societies, and nations face horrific consequences. The human journey in history contains the evidence of such. Out of these failures one learns, from these writings, that change is evolving and often unknown. The human journey is drawn back from the brink of destruction and with great lost of human lives. Brown points out these pattern but has no crystal ball to say what single thing is the causality. Instead he provides distinct characters who made a difference to ensure humanity sustained. These distinct characters often created opportunities and changes for human progress that benefited humanity. These moments in history often arose from individual and church wealth through pastoral care leadership to preserve the faith and communities they served. A personal note on Brown's insights on wealth and power gives a refreshing perspective from this period of history that enriched, no pun intended, my understanding of the various complexities involved with the evolution of Church and societies. The approach Brown used to deliver this historical period “through the eye of a needle” is a reminder to not follow habits or others rhetoric, instead discern with an eye of a needle in mind and spirit.

Some books have eighty pages of references and feature knowledgeable discussions of Syriac grammar and St Augustine's sermons. Some books are pacy and fun to read. This book is possibly unique in being both. It truly brings the past alive and at the same time it's intellectually rigorous. Great fun. My only criticism would be that sometimes I missed the bullet points, the elevator pitch and the 35,000 foot view. But probably historians are above such things....

This book traces the way early christianity developed as a movement rather than its theology. It deals with the period 359 to around 600 AS and mainly covers Western Europe.

Excellent Book, good bibliography and index

This is a truly outstanding history book. Its breadth and maturity of insight is remarkable and it places in a context many very important figures in later Latin Christianity at the end of the Roman era.

In this book, Peter Brown describes the development of Christian society between 4c and 6c with particular regard to the use of wealth. He traces the change in attitudes towards almsgiving, from the late classical notion of civic responsibility to Christian ideas of free giving to the poor and the ideal of temporal poverty itself. There is a huge amount of very learned research here and Brown writes with generosity towards other scholars and with the authority of his own acclaimed scholarship. Physically it is a big heavy book, but the style is light, and considering the enormous amount of sheer material it contains, this is not oppressive in tone. The subject is unusual and the historical period covered not one that will be immediately familiar (or necessarily attractive) to most readers, but I approached it in almost complete ignorance and have found it fascinating.