Aspects of Hellenism in Late Antiquity
A scholar of Hellenism in its broadest sense, Peter Brown has mapped out Late Antiquity, between the Classical Age and the Middle Ages in studies of the Roman Empire, notions of the sacred in secular and ecclesiastical life, and the beginnings of Christianity. Born in Dublin, Brown has pursued his academic career in Britain and the United States. He was in Greece recently to address the trustees dinner at the Gennadius Library and Kathimerini asked him about his work. How do you view the growth of Hellenic Studies in the US in recent years? As chairman of the Hellenic Studies Program in Princeton for four years, I have had an opportunity to judge the progress of Hellenic studies most clearly from the viewing point of my own campus. In the case of Princeton, I cannot think of a program that is more open to the multiple definitions of Hellenism and of the Hellenic tradition in all periods of its history and in all areas where Greeks have lived and contributed creatively to their environment (directly or through the legacy of their culture). Chronologically, we have stretched from the Late Antique through the Byzantine, to the post-Byzantine (Ottoman) period and up to yesterday (which includes particularly vivid visits of students to Greece and lively debate on the relations between Greece and the European Union). In space, this venture has included the entire Balkans, much of Eastern Europe as far as Georgia, and the entire eastern Mediterranean. This is Hellenism in its fullest definition, studied in such a manner as to place Greece itself on a world stage. In which sense is your work related to Hellenism since you have also researched Western Christendom? No student of the Early Church and of the Roman Empire can afford to make an arbitrary distinction between the Western and the «Hellenic» parts of the world which he or she studies. The unity of the Mediterranean itself ensures this, as does the fact that we are truly dealing with an empire which can call itself «Greco-Roman.» It is a world of mirrors: the theology of Augustine is inconceivable without late Hellenic Platonism; Roman Law would not have existed in the state which it does today without the work of lawyers who served the emperor Justinian in the Greek world of Constantinople and Beirut, at a time when the Hagia Sophia was being built. The Hellenic world simply cannot be excluded from the study of the so-called «West.» The moment I came to study Saint Augustine (in the 1960s) I realized that I would have to read Plotinus. Now that I turn to study him again (as I do often) I realize that my appreciation of his particularity – both of his genius and of his limitations – gains enormously through the knowledge I now have of his Greek contemporaries: of Gregory of Nyssa, Basil of Caesarea and John Chrysostom. I see the full study of Late Antiquity as a constant antiphonal performance, where each region contributes to the chant, and the «tone» of each region stands out more sharply to those who know the «tone» of other regions than to those who are content to study only the Latin or the Greek worlds. They were not closed to each other in reality, in the Late Antique period. They certainly should not be closed to each other in the studies of modern scholars. What made you initially wish to research this era? I have always considered myself to be a historian; and the duty of a historian is not to praise the past, but to describe how it changes. Process and change have always interested me more than perfection. Hence I have always been drawn to post-Classical ages. Again, it is a historian’s interest – an interest not only in what a religion says or claims, but what a religion does – how it alters the daily lives of people, how it creates new institutions, how it comes to color the very texture of social life. One cannot study the rise of Christianity only by reading the Gospels. It there any correlation between Late Antiquity and our times? Is the age in which we live an age of moral decline – like the «decadent» Roman empire? Is it an age of uncontrolled immigration – like the «barbarian invasions?» Is it an age of wild beliefs – like the end of paganism? Do we know what «modern times» are really like? They change so rapidly. Who, for instance, could have foretold only 30 years ago, the emergence of radical Islam and of other forms of socially and politically active extremism? It is a fortunate person who truly knows his own times. I have met few.
