Through the Eye of a Needle: Wealth, the Fall of Rome and the Making of Christianity in the West, 350–550 AD
“It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.” Yet by the time Rome fell, the Christian church was becoming rich beyond measure.
Peter Brown’s magnificent and prizewinning history examines how the early church navigated that contradiction, and in doing so traces the deepest roots of Western philanthropy.
In the last century and a half of the Roman Empire in the west, a quiet revolution took place in the relationship between wealth, religion, and the care of the poor. Drawing on letters, sermons, and the writings of Augustine, Ambrose, Jerome, and a host of lesser-known figures, Peter Brown traces how rich Christian donors, when faced with a faith that condemned avarice and called the poor blessed, found new ways to understand and justify the use of their wealth, above all through giving it away.
The result was a transformation of philanthropy itself. Where Roman civic generosity had meant endowing baths, theatres, and public games (gifts to the city that brought fame in this world) Christian giving was redirected towards the poor, the church, and the prospect of treasure in heaven. Brown shows how this new moral economy of wealth competed with and ultimately displaced older Roman traditions, and how spectacular acts of divestment by wealthy converts helped reshape the social fabric of the late empire.
Through the Eye of a Needle is not a narrow work of ecclesiastical history. It is a profound meditation on wealth, obligation, and the moral imagination, and one that speaks directly to anyone thinking about the historical foundations of philanthropic giving, the ethics of wealth, and the long relationship between religion and charity. It was the winner of the Philip Schaff Prize, the Jacques Barzun Prize in Cultural History, the R. R. Hawkins Award, and the PROSE Award in Classics and Ancient History.
About Peter Brown
Peter Brown is the Philip and Beulah Rollins Professor of History Emeritus at Princeton University and the world’s foremost scholar of late antiquity. His books include The World of Late Antiquity, Augustine of Hippo, and The Rise of Western Christendom.
Reviews
“A masterpiece of detailed historiography, brilliantly written. Peter Brown’s long-awaited book surpasses even the high expectations set by his previous writings.”
Elaine Pagels, Princeton University
“Through the Eye of a Needle is the crowning masterpiece of Peter Brown, the great historian who virtually invented late antiquity as a periodisation. It is not only the most compassionate study of late antiquity in the west ever written, but also a profoundly subtle meditation on our own tempestuous relationship with money.”
California Literary Review
“Magisterial. The formidably learned historian challenges commonly accepted notions about the role of wealth in the decline of the Roman empire and examines the roots of charity, two subjects relevant to contemporary economics.”
Marcia Z. Nelson, Publishers Weekly
Buy on Bookshop.org Buy on Amazon“It’s the gloriously ambitious panorama that most impresses. This is a book written in Cinemascope.”
Christopher Kelly, London Review of Books
