I HAD NOT paid enough attention to the great late-classical historian Peter Brown because I'd been turned off to him by a review I read of one of his books from around the turn of the millennium. I'd gotten the wrong idea from reading the review in one of the lefty publications that Brown was the kind of dismissive disciple of the "enlightenment" who rejected Christianity in that most modern of intellectual follies, believing that anti-Christians from some suburb of the all encompassing megalopolis, "modernism," could see Jesus and his followers and the later development of early Christianity better than those who lived it. That review couldn't have been more wrong about that.
It was lazy and stupid of me to not go to the bother of reading Peter Brown's scholarship because I'd been given an entirely wrong idea about him and his work not even second-hand but through the ideological filter of an enemy of Christianity. I've recently started on Brown's work through listening to his lectures and will soon go to the books as I have access to them and have found that that secondary level view of his work is a complete distortion of him. That's a good example of what's wrong with the typical modern scholastic view of early Christianity and the times and, so, world it arose in. If I could get a seriously wrong view of a scholar who lives at the same time I and the reviewer does, who lives in roughly the same world from the filtering of a typically modernistic, as I recall academic scribbler, how much more wrong will they get texts and the People who wrote them or spoke them from two thousand years ago?
That's not to say that modern scholars aren't at a considerable advantage from those of that decisive period in the development of the "enlightenment," as Peter Brown points out in the lecture I'm posting here, today's scholars have an enormously larger corpus of primary source material than even the greatest scholars of the past had available to them. He specifically mentions the iconic "enlightenment" interpreter of late Classical history, Edmund Gibbons. Not only is his still influential writing obviously deficient through his lack of knowledge of the enormous troves of previously unpublished manuscripts discovered preserved in desert sands and in ancient monastic libraries but also in having more direct access to enormous amounts of material that have been published. The scope of his knowledge was severely limited by the scope of his focus and it's blindingly obvious that his scholarship was led by his prejudices and biases.
It's bizarre that so much 18th and even 19th century scholarship is still the basis of the common received non-wisdom about things like that. I think it was Luke Timothy Johnson who pointed out that a student right now, with access to the internet has available to them enormously greater amounts of published materials, primary documents, not only printed and published but also legible imaging of manuscripts which only those with access to the greatest libraries of the early 20th century might have had. And I'd doubt that any library of ink on paper before the internet could have competed with what's available for free, now. I will point out that what's less available is the published scholarship of the recent past which is generally behind pay-walls. Unless you have access to the largest of university libraries, most of that is sealed off of any would be scholar or student without the ability to access it. I would add to that the enormously useful tools of word search and immediate access to a text on the screen that it would have taken many minutes if not hours of time to track down in the stacks, in the series, in the individual volumes, even when those were well indexed that you can find in seconds. Those hours and minutes and seconds really add up fast when you're doing research - I still remember the days I spent pouring through PDFs of a Victorian Anthropological journal only to find out that Darwin had lied about what another scientist had said. I wish all old journals, at least, were fully digitized.
Unfortunately, I can't provide a free link to a printed version of this lecture which is behind a pay wall. But the lecture itself is a revelation about the differing relationship to real work in Egyptian and Western monasticism and the rejection of labor for monks in Eastern Christian and other monasticism. It's really astonishing how much of Christianity is sealed off from most of the minds of most Christians and, far more so, those who think they know something about Christianity from the outside of it. It's a temptation to try to transcribe it but I'm not ready to do that yet. The questions and answers are almost as important as the lecture, itself.
I have found that Peter Brown is a far better and far more honest a scholar than the reviews had led me to believe and one with a really welcomed sense of humor. I will point out that several times in the lecture his severe stammer comes out but it's more than worth it to wait for him to continue. I'm glad he had the courage to give lectures despite that. This is one of the best historical lectures and one of the best lectures on early Christianity and late antiquity that I've yet heard. He is a great historian and a great scholar and I suspect a real Christian.
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