Author: Rhakotis Magazine

Oxford in the 1970s, a bastion of the intellectual elite.

Two respected scholars stand outside the ironwork grille heading into the Hawksmoor Quadrangle of All Souls.

One of the men puts his hand in his pocket and challenges the other to see whose ‘equipment’ was the biggest.

The young researcher witnessing this interaction, was suitably impressed. “I had been present at the meeting of giants” he writes with what must be some understatement.

The Oxford of the Gannex decades was different. Arnaldo Momigliano and Isiah Berlin were both given a key ring loaded with the keys that gave them access to various libraries and archives. Momigliano was curious who had access to the most closed collections.

In his new book, an intellectual memoir, the eminent historian Peter Brown describes his experience of post-war Oxford, a city of gentlemanly amateurs with a strongly stamped collegiate culture. The classic way to host a lecture from a visiting academic, we learn, was to invite them to give an after dinner talk. After a course of swans, or the non-Porterhouse equivalent (this is left to the reader’s imagination), followed by a steaming bowl of Welsh rarebit, the members of the college would settle down in the armchairs of the college common room and after several glasses of port, the guest would set off on his topic.

One speaker, Brown protects his identity, even fell asleep halfway through his lecture on the origin of the fief, the building blocks of feudal society. He woke up with a start. “Here I am. I am your Saint Sebastian. Riddle me with your arrows.” A group of eager medievalists took him to his word.

This was an Oxford of black tie candlelight suppers (“both a symbol of collegiality and the means by which unaffected courtesy could be extended by the old to the young”) and lunches with the fellows squashed on benches in the buttery. 

A delicious image of a world long gone, or at least distant to most people.

Peter Brown is what can be called with some justice a rock star academic. (If this is the right term. Brown might prefer the term ‘impresario’ used for one of his own musical heroes Sir Thomas Beecham.)

He is recognised as the father of Late Antiquity, a field of study encompassing various academic fields examining the history of Africa and Eurasia c. 200 – 800 CE. His work was both very important for scholars and more widely. Throughout his memoir he describes how he would write for an educated general public, first his aunts and then Bob Silvers, the editor of the New York Review of Books. 

This is a rich book providing deep insight into Brown’s worldview. A fact I hadn’t realized was that Brown was kicked out of his PhD programme, with his wider reputation outside of Oxford, largely resting on his biography of St Augustine. This memoir sets the backdrop of his earlier work. It is a reminder that his biography of St Augustine (published in the Summer of Love, 1967) was written not just against the backdrop of the sexual revolutions of the sixties, but also against Vatican II, the important Church council which sought to liberalize some teachings of the Catholic church, and had inspired serious work on the field of Patristics (the study of ancient theologians, the so called Church Fathers). 

Brown recognises the work of other scholars who had been studying the field and building the foundations before and alongside him. He is generous in his praise and an enthusiastic summariser of much key scholarship. His anecdotes bring his characters alive, like the Reverend Frend, the historian of early Christianity, brandishing a piece of Roman lead pipe at a lecture and nearly braining Brown’s wife. But they are too brief. He is perhaps too generous to his colleagues and as a result his memoir can be a little dry, which is surprising given how vividly he recreates the leaders of the ancient church in his history.

One of the best anecdotes comes from someone else. Pierre Hadot, the French scholar, told Brown he had witnessed the future Pope John XXIII exploding at being served wine from the wrong side, at an event in Paris, by a pious layman who had volunteered for the honor. A serious failure of sang froid. Although Brown does not come out and say it, the implication is clear. Mother Church, unlike Oxford, does not incubate gentlemen. 

This approach is most disappointing when it comes to Michel Foucault. Brown is widely associated with the French philosopher. He was important, ‘a mythical figure’ in Berkeley, on everyone’s lips. Brown remembers discussing him with a friend in a coffee shop and a woman asking him ‘What is that Fu-ko you are always talking about? Is it a form of martial arts?” It was at Berkeley he first fully engaged, reading a history of Sexuality, Volume One. Although he had known figures like Arnaldo Momigliano and Isiah Berlin, he was impressed: ‘There was a lot to say “Gosh” about’ he reflects.

Of the man himself, Brown describes him as ‘purposive’. Over beers in the Bear’s Lair (a student pub), the two men spoke for two hours on early Christian writers. Later he enjoyed a homemade stew at Foucault’s Paris apartment (his mother’s recipe) and discussed anglophone scholars of late antiquity. Although little of the man is shared in the biography, it is clear he was an important source of new intellectual insight for Brown:

“I was fortunate to have known the living Foucault, even if only as briefly as a crackle of lightning, and to be touched by the freshness of his ever-questioning mind – the mind of a true philosopher, brought to bear on so many issues that had been blocked by intellectual inertia and false familiarity.”

(Page 590) 

If there is one star throughout the book it is the photocopier. Brown mentions how it changed scholarship making copies of rare texts more accessible to scholars of all levels. It is perhaps more a reflection of the topic of the book and his own privacy, that the photocopier is mentioned the same number of times as his wife. 

The figure of Brown himself remains elusive. Beyond his historical work, we glean he is a fan of classical music and films and a noted connoisseur of the Great Train Robbery of 1963 (having acted out the various roles to his fellow attendees at the Oxford Patristics Conference of 1963). If the main theme is his intellectual journey, then an important sub-theme is the institutions that supported him. 

The universities of Oxford, Royal Holloway and Berkely are all sketched with brief and vivid pen portraits. We also have a sense of Brown’s complex position as a member of the Anglican community in a recently liberated and still segregated Ireland, the son of a middle ranking officer in the colonial railways (in Sudan) and the alumnus of Shrewsbury Public School. Experiences that have defined his approach to scholarship of the later Roman Empire. He describes the sense of being a member of an embattled elite class on the frontier of a crumbling empire. 

I was reminded of J.G. Farrell, the Irish novelist who explored the same themes in a trilogy of novels. Brown and Farrell were, we learn almost in passing, close friends from childhood. Farrell in his diary perhaps best sums up Brown. Reading the biography of St Augustine, Farrell wrote “Anyone capable of interesting me in schisms in the Church in Late Roman times must be a genius”.

Indeed, it strikes me that the books which this biography can be best compared to are novels. Brown proceeds from the Anglo-Ireland of Elizabeth Bowen to the campus novels of David Lodge. At its most poignant, Brown lightly touches on great complex themes and history.

A detail almost from Bowen’s novels, an horrific memory from his childhood, on the day of Hitler’s death in 1945, Brown passed the German embassy in Dublin on a bus, at eye level its vile Swastika flag hanging at half mast. His aunt told him to keep quiet as you couldn’t be sure of the sympathies of other people on the bus. It would haunt anyone for the rest of their lives and impact their understanding of empire.

Brown’s academic career has taken place across the latter half of the twentieth century and into the first three decades of this century. These were years of post-war economic confidence and increased access to higher education. During Brown’s time teaching at Oxford, the student body grew by 20%, while on average in the UK it grew by 300%. In the 80s, universities faced cuts led by Margaret Thatcher. Yet, this was also a period of international academic careers and jetset conferences, which Lodge so joyfully sent up in his novels.

“There are three things which have revolutionized academic life in the last twenty years, though very few people have woken up to the fact: jet travel, direct-dialling telephones and the Xerox machine. Scholars don’t have to work in the same institution to interact, nowadays: they call each other up, or they meet at international conferences. And they don’t have to grub about in library stacks for data: any book or article that sounds interesting they have xeroxed and read at home. Or on the plane going to the next conference.”

David Lodge, Small World (The Campus Trilogy, Vintage, 2011), P 269

It is hard to read this book without reflecting on the situation now. This is more vivid for me as I was inspired to study late antiquity at university in large part because of Peter Brown’s books, a decision I still don’t mostly regret. 

The only time I have actually been taught how to write an academic essay, as a mature grad student, I was told “Never quote. Never quote. Never quote, not even if it is the most beautiful piece of prose you’ve ever read, not even if it is Peter Brown, not even if it is Peter Brown’s most exquisite piece of writing. Never quote”. This I think gives a good sense of Brown’s reputation. 

I have gone the opposite way to several people who go from classical antiquity to late antiquity,  moving from the Constantinian dynasty to the Severans, from ancient Christianities to traditional Egyptian religion. Yet I take something from Brown’s approach, which I think is understanding the importance of long term cultural trends including non-elite or local cultures and the merging and blurring between the edges.  

Alongside the growth of the field of late antiquity, the university sector itself has shrunk. In the UK, humanities courses are in danger of disappearing completely from all but Oxbridge colleges and a few stubborn Russell Group universities. This is terrible when such courses are vital to understanding the world, yet perhaps, it is only a return to the situation of 80 years ago.

Brown’s biography offers an important riposte to the almost utilitarian understanding of education, presenting university as an important way to develop humane people who have an innate respect for culture. I agree, this is important, but it would be good to unpick what this might mean in increasingly divided and hierarchical societies. 

Although we might take a vicarious pleasure in reading about the foibles of academics measuring each other’s importance, we are also sadly returning back to the days, where less and less people are given the keys to open up the closed doors of knowledge.

Journeys of the Mind: A Life in History by Peter Brown is published by Princeton.