The Patricia H. Labalme Friends of the Library lecture was delivered on Thursday evening to a full house at the Villa Aurelia. This lecture also formed part of the ongoing New Work in the Humanities Series, overseen by Mellon Professor, Kim Bowes (2006 Fellow). Simultaneous Italian translation was available and a reception followed the event.
Director Christopher Celenza (1994 Fellow) welcomed guests and introduced the American Academy’s Drue Heinz Librarian, Sebastian Hierl, who discussed the library’s role as a premier research destination for classical studies. Hierl extended the Academy’s profound thanks to the Friends of the Library, whose support is crucial in maintaining and expanding the Academy’s treasured collections. Celenza then introduced the evening’s speaker, a pioneering scholar of the late antique.
Peter Brown, the Philip and Beulah Rollins Professor Emeritus of History at Princeton University, has taught at London University and the University of California, Berkeley. His books include Augustine of Hippo (1967), The Rise of Western Christendom (1995, 2002), and most recently, Through the Eye of the Needle: Wealth, the Fall of Rome and the Making of Christianity in the West (350–550 AD) (2012). He has been the recipient of several distinguished awards for his research on the early Christian world, including a MacArthur Fellowship, a Distinguished Achievement Award from the Andrew Mellon Foundation, the International Balzan Prize, and the Kluge Prize from the US Library of Congress. Speaking on “Constantine, Eusebius of Caesarea and the Future of Christianity,” Brown attempted to add a new dimension to discussions of the early fourth century by asking how early Christians may have envisioned the future.
Brown argued that an eerie grandeur has come to surround Constantine as the figure around whom Christianity solidified its dominance, yet this retrospective view often obscures the more cautious expectations that Christians themselves then had for the future of their creed. Over the course of his discussion he painted a picture of the Christian worldview between 312 and 337 as one that envisioned a “thin universalism,” but could not yet imagine itself in a “majoritarian” position. “The insistent Christian,” Brown explained, “is an anachronism,” for men like Eusebius and Constantine shared perspectives that had been shaped in the late third and early fourth centuries and had no sense of the universalism to come. Their relative tolerance suggested the confidence of those who believed that God’s acts had succeeded and the Christian revolution had already taken place.
Historians often imagine it being but a short step from Constantine I to Theodosius I, but Brown insists that these leaders were separated by a decade of intense change and that it was only in the maelstrom of a long fourth century that Christianity truly came of age. In attempting to reconstruct a vision of the future as seen by those in the past, he engages in the most difficult kind of history, which acknowledges the innately subjective character of a discipline that can only be projected backward and filtered through the eyes of the present.