Peter Brown is known to many as the author of the (still!1) definitive biography of St. Augustine. That, in itself, would be quite enough to accomplish in one life. The thing is, Brown accomplished this feat when he was just 31 years old.
Brown’s sprawling2 but absorbing memoir, Journeys of the Mind: A Life in History, achieves what his title promises: he generates drama out of a life spent reading books, mired in archives, sitting in his reading chair thinking. Like “paperwork movies” (Moneyball, etc) that dramatize equations and research, Brown takes us along for the ride as he gets curious, asks questions, tries to answer them, and then learns to ask better ones. The adventure, here, mostly unfolds in the swirl of Brown’s mind and then tracks the emergence of ideas as they appears in essays and books.3 I supposed this isn’t the sort of thing that lands on the bestseller list, but to me, Journeys of the Mind captures what it feels like to be a scholar whose intellect is hungry and sharp, wedding a voracious curiosity to the distinct disciplines that we call “scholarship.”
Indeed, I think Brown—an unquestioned eminence—illustrates something important: what makes someone a generative “scholar” is not an aura of settled expertise but rather the coupling of rigorous discipline with the ability to be a perpetual student. The authority of the scholar comes, not from their position or status or silly letters P, H, and D after their name. Rather their authority stems from their capacity to show us something about the world and ourselves because they have cultivated habits of attention and discipline that yield insight and new knowledge when the chase questions into new territory. This was, to me, the most encouraging aspect of Brown’s autobiography: he did not set out as an “authority” on some cornered piece of academic turf and exercise scholarly authority over this narrow terrain; rather, he cultivated rigorous habits & disciplines as a historian and brought all of that with him as his questions propelled him into unfamiliar territory, perpetually, for his entire life.4 If, after his investigations, he published definitive works of scholarship that made him an “expert,” the expertise came later, so to speak. We don’t listen to Peter Brown’s authority as an “expert” because of some office he holds but rather because he did the work. When he began the work, he was a well-disciplined student, even forty years into his career as an academic.
One of the marks of Brown’s humanity, charity, and virtue is the remarkable gratitude that suffuses this memoir. Where some eminent scholars might, late in life, look for opportunities to settle scores, there is not a hint of this in Journeys of the Mind. Instead, Brown illustrates the inherently communal aspect of serious scholarship; he is only too happy to celebrate his peers and acknowledge all of his debts to fellow scholars (as well as early teachers5).
This is, in part, because the story of Brown’s own academic career is synonymous with the emergence of an entire academic field of history that we now know as “late antiquity.” When the young Brown was setting out as a historian, this field did not yet exist. Instead, the late centuries of the Roman Empire (roughly 200-600) were merely the denouement of the ancient world, an era of “decadence” and decline which then culminated in the “dark ages” of the “Middle” ages. Brown was part of a constellation of scholars who changed this: these centuries were as much about birth and emergence as endings and decline (a crucial reframing of St. Augustine’s own place and legacy, by the way6). Just as Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs is, at the same time, a history of personal computing, so too Brown’s memoir is the history of a field. It is fascinating to watch the field emerge in “real time,” as it were.
Brown’s story also provides a fascinating glimpse of scholarly worlds that no longer exist. Perhaps most poignant is his portrait of Oxford in the 1950s and 60s.7 But also compelling is his portrait of Berkeley in the 1970s (including his formative encounters with Michel Foucault). I only wish we got his take on Princeton. In this comparison and contrast between Oxford and Berkeley, we see the way two different educational systems generate very different kinds of scholarship and teaching. The world of the tutorial, bent on preparation for class-wide exams (Oxford), generates a thick canon and a kind of stasis that is difficult to disrupt; whereas the world of the seminar and course-specific examinations (Berkeley, and the U.S. more broadly) makes space for dynamism and development but can mean the loss of a common language. Those interested in questions of curriculum and pedagogy will find much to contemplate here.
Brown also provides some marvelously concrete vignettes. One of my favorites is his encomium to the photocopier. “[O]ne unsung hero remains to be praised: the photocopier machine. It is impossible to overestimate its importance for the freeing-up of scholarship in the last 1960s and 1970s. It both multiplied and delocalized knowledge.”
I am hardly doing justice to this remarkable book. Let me close with just one crucial insight that suffuses Brown’s entire academic project—an insight that circles round to become a conviction that drives further investigation. It is what Brown describes as the “strangeness” of the past. You see this emerging already at Shrewsbury as a sensibility absorbed from one of his teachers:
History, for me, has always been something more than a discipline—more than a set of problems to be solved, a narrative to be put together from bits and pieces of evidence about the past. It is rather, a perpetual awareness of living beside an immense, strange country whose customs must be treated by the traveler from the present with respect, as often very different from our own; and whose aspirations, fears, and certitudes, though they may seem alien to us and to have turned pale with the passing of time, must be treated as having once run in the veins of men and women in the past with all the energy of living flesh and blood (104).
Notice that the key to this “respect” is not too override the strangeness by simply asserting a bland common humanity, but rather, assuming this humanity, to endeavor to understand how strange and unique their world was. This, to me, has the hallmarks of a Hegelian insight: that consciousness itself changes over the course of history—that human being-in-the-world has taken on different forms of consciousness over time. And only if we appreciate the strangeness of the past could be perhaps understand the path to our present.
Later Brown says this is something he learned from the French scholar Paul Verne:
Veyne went out of his way to drive home, at every point, the strangeness of the classical world. He insisted that Romans were not versions of ourselves, dressed up in togas: they were irreducibly exotic. Institutions and emotions that seem continuous with our own sensibilities, such as marriage and love, were profoundly different from what they are nowadays.
As we actively debate concerns about presentism in history, Brown’s respect for the strangeness of the past is exemplary and instructive. It is just one of the gifts he has given me, which I am here happy to acknowledge and celebrate, as he does so generously. Brown’s model gives me permission to confess that I am a scholar only because I was looking for a vocation that would allow me to be a perpetual student.
Brown inspires hope, and a reframing of where I am in my own story. Now comfortably into my 50s, it’s easy to have thoughts of how little time is left. But what if I’m not yet even halfway into this adventure of the mind?
Don’t talk to me about Robin Lane Fox’s recent attempt which, though erudite, and drawing upon continued scholarship, is bent on diminishing his subject. I’m anti-hagiography, but I’m not sure one can be a masterful biographer of someone you loathe.
Also: you can use footnotes in Substack?!? Hoo boy: get ready for some Infinite-Jest-y indulgence from me.
At over 700 pages, the book still only manages to cover up to 1987—after which Brown has remained a creative and prolific scholars for over 35 years, including field-defining studies of poverty and wealth in late ancient Christianity such as Through the Eye of a Needle. Brown doesn’t give us any indication of volume 2, but I’d sign up for the midnight book launch like it was the next installment of Harry Potter.
I say “mostly” because there are also journeys of Brown’s body, so to speak—actual travels in which the questions his mind asks compel him to look for evidence and insight in Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, and elsewhere.
Brown wears his learning lightly, and it never feels like a posture of false humility. One of the most remarkable threads of his story is a remarkable willingness, and facility, to learn new languages. In his undergraduate years at Oxford, for example, he lets slip: “Somehow I came to read Italian.” Like, Oops, I did it again, learned a foreign language. This continues throughout his life: Farsi, Urdu, I lost track.
Such as “Kek” (Frank McEachran), a literature teacher at the Shrewsbury school of Brown’s childhood, whom he describes as “the great awakener,” awakening the young Peter to Europe, to poetry, and to the fateful intuition that the so-called “fall” of the Roman Empire (in Gibbons’ worn phrase) was, in fact, the beginning of something. As Brown later puts it, “Brilliant beginnings, bright Golden Ages did not thrill me. Whether it was at the end of the Roman Empire or at the waning of the Middle Ages, it was the lurch of change toward the unknown and the unthinkable that held my attention” (130).
One of my favorite episodes is Brown’s recounting of the 1963 Patristics conference, convened in Oxford, where he sees this emerging “late antiquity” shaping the way scholars approach the Church fathers (chapter 43).
Also: I did warn you about the footnotes. Get used to it.
Brown, by the way, was elected as one of two Fellows at All Souls in 1956. The other?None other than Charles Taylor. How much of my intellectual life has been shaped by decisions by Oxford dons in 1956?!