Vol. 6, No. 2 1 April 1980 Religious Studies Review / 91

is a personal vision, which may possess profundity and beauty, but is convincing neither on the plane of formal, discursive scholarship, nor on that of the religious fact (or facts) experienced by Muslims.

It would be an impertinence to overlook the grandeur and sweep of Corbin’s work or to belittle the magnitude of his achievement. He transformed utterly the study of both Islamic philosophy and of Shi‘ism, and no Western student of these topics, or indeed of Islam in general, can afford to shirk a careful reading of his works. The reader should not be intimidated, however, by the magisterial eloquence of Corbin’s tone, or by the wide and imaginative erudition his writings display. Like Massignon before him, Corbin can be said to have attempted a selective appropriation of Islam by rearranging its component elements in a pattern that he felt to be congenial, personally satisfying, and, therefore, true. His enterprise was a rarefied and idiosyncratic form of spiritual colonialism.

NOTES ~~ ~

It is concisely defined by Sharif JurjHni (1969, 269) as “the subsistence of Gods servant through God after his obliteration with respect to himself.”

The perceptive analysis of Massignon’s work by Edward Said (1978), 264-75, suggests many points of comparison with Corbin.

See Corbin, 1972, a paper given, significantly, at the Inter- national Congress of Iranology held at Shiraz in 1971 on the occasion of “the 2500th anniversary of the foundation of the Per- sian Empire.”

See A. J. Arberry’s autobiographical sketch prefaced to the posthumously published second volume of his translation of Mysti- cal Poems of Rumi (1979), ix-xiv.

REFERENCES

WORKS BY HENRY CORBIN 1939 Suhrawardi d‘Alep. Paris: Maisonneuve. 1960a (solar; 133931.) 1960b ET Auicennu and the Visionary Recital. Pantheon Books. 196Oc “Pour une morphologie de la spiritualitk shi’ite.” Eranos

Jahrbuch 29. 1960-61 “L‘kcole shaykhie en thkologie shi‘ite.” Annuaare de I‘Ecob Pratique des Hautes Etudes, Section des Sciences Religiewes, 1-60. 1969 ET Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Zbn ‘Arabi. Prince- ton University Press. 1971-72 En Islam iranien. 4 vols. Paris: Gallimard. 1972 “For the Concept of Irano-Islamic Philosophy.” The Philosophical Forum (Boston) 411, 114-23. 1977 E T Spritual Body and Celestial Earth: From Madean Iran to Shi‘ite Iran. Bollingen Series, 4 1/2. Princeton University Press. 1978 ET The Man of Light in Iranian Sufism. Shambhala (Boul- der, CO).

Maktab-i Tmhuyyu‘. Qum, Iran.

WORKS BY OTHER AUTHORS

ARBERRY, A. J. (TRANS.) 1979 ET der, CO).

1965 Imprimerie Catholique.

1975 York Press (Albany).

Mystical Poems of Rumi. Vol. 2. Westview Press (Bod-

AL-HAKTM AT-TIRMIDHT Kit& Khatm al-AwliyZ. Edited by Othman Yahya. Beirut:

FAZLUR, RAHMAN The Philosophy of Mulla Sadra. State University of New

JURJANi, SHARiF 1969 Kitiib at-Ta‘r$it. Beirut: Librairie du Liban.

NWYIA, PAUL 1970 Exegise Coranique et Langage myshque. Beirut: Dar al- Machreq Editeurs.

RAFIQI, ABDUL QAIYUM N.d. ing House.

SAID, EDWARD 1978 Orientalism. Pantheon Books.

Sqism in Kashmir. Varanasi and Delhi: Bharatiya Publish-

“MASTER OF THE STRAY DETAIL”: PETER BROWN AND HISTORIOGRAPHY

Patrick Henry Swarthmore College

Swarthmore, PA I9081

The invitation to write a survey review of Peter Brown’s work is a challenge to justify to myself and others the hold this man’s portrayal of the world I study has come to have over me. I came away from reading Augmtim of Hippo: A Biography with something of the exhilaration Keats felt on first looking into Chapman’s Homer. I know other patristics scholars who, lacking my native-Texan penchant for en- thusiasm and hyperbole, nevertheless abandon academic caution and professional prickliness when admitting how Brown has helped them see things fresh and new. To review Brown’s work is to attempt a measurement of a powerful electric charge (to adapt one of Brown’s favorite metaphors) administered over the past two decades to a broad field of study.

I propose to measure the charge by passing it through four questions:

1. What does Brown think he is doing? 2. What are his suspicions? 3. What are his questions? 4. What is his method?

This will be less an account of achieved results than an assessment of the way Brown has reached his conclusions, for his work is not an icon to be venerated, but an undertak- ing to be joined.

WHAT DOES BROWN THINK HE IS DOING?

This question is particularly important in Brown’s case be- cause he is doing something uncommon in a field which usually falls into a classicist’s appendix or a medievalist’s prolegomenon. The territory is of course not unexplored; Rostovtzeff, Nock, Jones, Dodds, Marrou, Frend, and others have staked their claims, and the somber hues of Gibbon can still be glimpsed at the lowest stratum of the palimpsest map of the age built up by recent generations of scholarship. The tradition of patristic scholarship since the seventeenth century has minutely examined the theological and ecclesiastical remains of the period. Brown readily ad- mits his debts to previous explorers, but insists he is doing something different. To disregard this insistence is to risk criticizing Brown for not doing something he has no inten- tion of doing.

Vol. 6, No. 2 / April 1980 92 / Religious Studies Review

Peter Brown does not like labels, and is wary of assign- ing them to himself. The closest he has come to a succinct characterization of his scholarly identity is in A Social Context to the Religious Crisis of the Third Century A.D. : a “historian of religious sentiment” ( S C , 1). “Sentiment” here should be construed in its French, not its English, sense. Brown wants to understand nothing less than “what it was like to live in that world” ( W U , 7), how persons “came to feel so different from each other” (RS, 12). He believes one of the main reasons people come to feel different is that they come to feel differently, and he believes religion has more bearing than anything else on how people feel. Taking a very long view, we can say that in Brown’s work Schleiermacher’s reorienta- tion of religion is finally coming to expression in specifically historical study.

Brown refuses, however, to treat religious feeling or sentiment as simply a condition of the individual psyche. He sees his task as that of linking William James’s insight into the varieties of religious experience, with its poignant ob- servation of persons in their solitude, to a changing social context (SC, 1). “We must at all costs,” Brown says, “avoid doing the feeling” for the persons of Late Antiquity; “holy dread” is to be set aside ( M U , 10). Religious belief has a major role in specifically social creativity-a creativity which in the Late Antique period covered the landscape with ex- traordinarily tenacious institutions: monasteries, papacy, codified Roman law, the Byzantine Empire (RS, 13). Brown reveals the freshness of his viewpoint when he suggests that the hagiographical formula charis energousa “means, I would have thought, socially effective power” (SC, 40). He “has stumbled on the need to study, in the past, the nexus that links inner experiences of men to the society around them” (RS, 16).

This concentration on “the changing quaIity of life and of social relations” (MLA, 23) brings many new contrasts to light, and deepens others. For instance, Brown contends that the changes of the third and fourth century, when “the halo and the face came together” (SC, 4), “cut off the Chris- tian church quite as much from its own past as from its pagan contemporaries” ( M U , 97). We knew that Justin Martyr and Athanasius were different; Brown makes us see that the Lifeof Anthony, more than the Creed of Nicaea, is the measure of the chasm between them. And just as contrasts are highlighted, continuities are discerned: the orthodox Christianity of mid-fifth-century Romans, even Pope Leo, turns out to be, at the level of religious sentiment, much like the anti-barbarian imperial patriotism of the fourth-century pagan Senators (RS, 168-80).

For the beginning of his most recent book Brown has finally hit upon the perfect expression for his enterprise. Scholarly breath is notoriously resistant to being taken away, but I confess to having lost mine on reading

I wish that I had been one of the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus. These Christian brothers had been walled up in a cave in the middle of the third century, during the pagan persecution of the Emperor De- cius (249-5 1). They were awakened in the early fifth century, in the reign of Decius’ direct successor, the Emperor Theodosius 11 (408-50), in order to enlighten that most Christian monarch on a point concerning the resurrection of the dead. Imagine their sur- prise when, on entering the city, they saw the Cross placed above the main gate, heard men freely swearing by the name of Christ, saw a great church and the Christian clergy busied with repairing

the walls of the city, and found that the solid silver coins of a pagan emperor caused amazement in the marketplace. This book is an attempt to enter into their surprise ( M U , 1).

WHAT ARE HIS SUSPICIONS?

If Peter Brown ever writes a Confessions, the functional equivalent of Augustine’s hearing tolb, lege chanted across the garden wall should be an account of a performance of HMS Pinafore during which Brown was struck by the her- meneutical potential of Little Buttercup’s “oracular reveal- ing” that “Things are seldom what they seem.”

Brown is an exponent of what Paul Ricoeur has called a “hermeneutics of suspicion.” Our own time has of course not invented Buttercup’s insight; Socrates, among others, paid the price for calling spades spades. What is new is the theoretical framework provided by Freud, to whom Brown occasionally alludes. The specific references, however, are only the outward and visible sign of Brown’s inward appro- priation of the psychoanalytic revolution. Dislocations in human consciousness bulk larger in Brown’s account of the past than do movements of legions or even fluctuations in the economy. “Private distances” were the “unbridgeable” ones (RS, 12).

But Brown is evenhanded in the distribution of his suspicions. If Freud has helped him to see that “nothing is quite what it appears on the surface” (RS, 10-1 l), and hence that it is always legitimate to ask, of an ancient (or contempo- rary) source, “What is really going on?,” the anthropologists and sociologists have made Brown suspicious of the limita- tions inherent in the focus on the psyche. In a critique of E. R. Dodds, Brown calculates that the undeniable brilliance of Dodds’s Pagan and Christian in an Age of Anxiety is bought at a price: Freudian analysis “is overwhelmingly diagnostic, and diagnosis isolates” (RS, 76). What Dodds’s trenchant account of the rise of asceticism leaves unintelligible is the fact that “without exception, the most effective politicians and organizers of the fourth century were either men of ascetic taste or leaders of ascetic movements-Pachomius, Athanasius, the Emperor Julian, Basil of Caesarea, Am- brose and Augustine” ( R S , 79).

Like Augustine, Brown knows that we are weighed down by habit-and the “we” includes scholars, just as for Augustine it included bishops. Brown is suspicious of re- ceived opinion, on the grounds that it is frequently a “labor- saving device.” Do we assume that ‘‘rootlessness,’’ a “dizzy- ing expansion of horizons,” accounts for the mood of Late Antiquity? Brown suspects it was more like claustrophobia ( M U , 4). Do we consider that Platonism can come to terms with the Hebrew Scriptures only by draining them of the concrete and of passion? Brown shows how it was precisely Platonism that opened up the ancient Israelite world of feeling for Augustine ( A H , 257).

Brown has managed to sustain the historian’s version of Keats’s “Negative Capability’’-he “will not produce any single ‘explanation’” (RS, 183). He will bind religion to soci- ety and then note that religious movements do bypass exist- ing social divisions ( R S , 293). He will insist that relations among social groups are what we must understand, and then he reminds us (and himself) that “of all the subjects studied by an historian, the relation of the parts of a society.. . to each other is the subject in which certainty is

Vol. 6, No. 2 / April 1980

least possible, and a false certainty most misleading” (RS, 250-51). Brown has sharply drawn the difference in spirit between the historian and the philosopher, with an implied judgment on those historians who try to be what they are not: the philosopher has “a passion for a single method, within which all problems might be fruitfully posed and answered, and outside which no problems would exist” (AH, 121).

It has been instructive to read, concurrently with the Brown coTpw, Jane Kramer’s New Yorker “Profile” of the Italian Communist Party(September 24,1979,47-181). She conveys the quality of the whole by a focused look at a single cornme, illustrating the truth in Brown’s suggestion that “the bitter precision of life’s small heartbreaks” may tell us more about what is really going on than “the invocation of per- vasive moods and of public misfortunes” ( M L A , 5-6). What Kramer ferrets out are the ironies of cultural continuity- “He has sworn to the Virgin Mother (whom he repudi- ates)”-and the psychodynamics of discontinuity-“One reason the Party lost votes, for the first time in thirty years, in the parliamentary elections last June was that a million or so boys and girls-at the polls for the first time-considered it humiliating to pull the same levers as their parents.” Both the ironies and the psychodynamics mock ideology. That is exactly the Brownian tone, and makes clear what is Brown’s most revolutionary-indeed, his brashest-suspicion. He is suspicious of the skepticism, rooted in historians, which says that the kind of story Jane Kramer tells about the living cannot responsibly be told about the dead.

~~ ~~ ~ ~

WHAT ARE HIS QUESTIONS?

The question Brown keeps asking is deceptively simple: What do people actually do? How did the people of Late Antiquity spend their days, twenty-four hours long just like ours?

Attention to this question keeps Brown from serving up whole eras on a single dish, and makes him sensitive to subtle flavors in the sources. For instance, he takes the measure of Augustine’s preaching, an activity the priest/bishop en- gaged in every week for thirty-nine years. “In the unselfcon- scious routine of these sermons we can come as close as is possible to the foundations of Augustine’s qualities as a thinker” ( A H , 254-56). And Brown notices that Augustine’s writings are full of faces, and above all, voices; Augustine is almost never alone, and the crucial feature of his mature thought is that it is carried on in a community ( A H , 32-35, 270). In a very different context, Brown reports that Sy- meon Stylites “touched his toes 1244 times in bowing before God from the top of his column. The true horror of this story lies not in the exertions of the saint, but in the layman who stood there counting’’ (MLA, 13-14). Brown has no- ticed, in other words, that one of the things Late Antique people did was carefully quantify holiness.

The corollary of asking what people do is asking what the sources actually talk about. Brown strikes me as an uncommonly good listener. He insists that “respect for the challenge posed by [the] gap between ourseives and others cannot be asserted and defended too often,” and he says of his own subjects, “saved by the passing of fifteen hundred years from the need to reassure us, they could appear ex-

- ___ __ -

Religious Studies Review / 95

actly as they were-every bit as odd as we are, as problemati- cal, as difficult of access” (RS, 20-21). One must be on the lookout for images, and must feel the pull of shiftingcenters of spiritual gravity. The early Augustine talks about ascent, the later Augustine talks about the journey, iter; and this shift becomes all the more resonant when one notices how frequently Augustine says he detested traveling (AH, 152). As Augustine grows older, his biblical exegesis spirals to- ward the historical books of the Old Testament, with drastic implications for his address to the Pelagian question (AH, 428). In the Sayings of the Desert Fatliers the struggle with anger (a specifically social disruption) takes up more space than the “demon of fornication,” and the danger of sex itself is seen primarily in its binding persons to conven- tional social structures ( M U , 88).

There are dozens of subsidiary questions Brown asks; they are characteristically the questions of a skilled analyst who knows how to open out the general significance of the particular and how to give the general a local habitation and a name. Why do oracles cease?-Plutarch’s question, to be sure, but now it provokes an insight into shifting swial realities (MLA, 38). What most impressed contemporaries about the hermits?-their spectacular austerities, \or: (this is Brown’s contention) their social disengagement ( M U , 86- 87)? We are accustomed to reformers who harbor a private contempt for the masses they seek to influence; how does Augustine, who seems programmed for such disdain, avoid it (AH, 208)? What are the human and social implications of doctrines? Brown presses this question into the PeIagian controversy, and concludes, persuasively, that the funda-

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94 / Religious Studies Review Vol. 6, No. 2 I April 1980

mental issue was not the freedom of the will, but the nature of the relation between church and world (esp. RS, 194-95).

Brown’s way of picking up on ancient hints and modern guesses strikes some historians as the most perilous of leaps of faith, but Brown would simply ask them to reflect on their own exDerience, their own loves and antagonisms, their

WHAT IS HIS METHOD?

Copyrighting, cataloguing, indexing, abstracting-we have constituted a “fail-safe” mechanism of proprietorship, mak- ing it unlikely any of us will be reduced to the charming anonymity of those artists of bygone ages who are known to us only as “Master of 1446” o r “Master of the Virgin among Virgins.” Should the system ever break down, however, and such a fate befall Peter Brown, his works could be assembled by anyone with an ear for style, and he would be designated “Master of the Stray Detail.”

Brown says that the biographer of Augustine ‘‘will be constantly reminded, often by a stray detail-by nothing more, perhaps, than by a turn of phrase used in addressing a friend-f the long, inner journeys of Augustine” ( A H , 9). In Augustine’s exegesis the significance of a passage “sud- denly comes to light on a tiny detail” ( A H , 255). And both Augustine and Freud, in their theories of human motiva- tion, give pride of place to signs, hints, “slips of the tongue” ( A H , 253). The very devices we human beings use to hide from one another become, paradoxically, clues to who we really are.

Brown’s work gains its rich texture from its concrete- ness, its attention to detail. The different attitude of Augus- tine and the Pelagians toward babies says volumes about their competing theologies ( A H , 351-52). Scenes from a Roman burial vault flesh out the spirituality of a social class ( A H , 70). The “workings of the common ties of marriage” help account for the Christianization of the Empire (RS, 164). Brown would rather dig among the anecdotes of the Sayings of the Fathers than expatiate on the magisterial treatises of bishops.

Closely allied to Brown’s mastery of detail is his com- mand of analogy. When patristics scholars discuss Brown, we eventually get round to expressing our intimidation at his unerring instinct for the perfectly targeted comparison. One will have to serve here for the scores he has conjured up. In the fourth century, “the rise of the economic position of the Christian Church was sudden and dramatic: it mush- roomed like a modern insurance company” (WLA, 109). Like all good analogies, this works both ways-we see not only how then is like now, but we are also set to wondering whether insurance companies play a role today like the church’s in Late Antiquity.

The method of detail and the gift for analogy come to a focus in Brown’s citation of Gerard Manley Hopkins’ poem, The Wreck of the Deutschland. With the poet’s precision and compression, Hopkins clarifies, as no extended analysis can, the shift in religious sensibility between the world of the New Testament and the world of Augustine, corresponding fairly closely to the context for the “surprise” of the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus. “We pass over a watershed in Christian attitudes as to how a man may be formed by his contact with the divine: it is no longer ‘at once, as once at acrash Paul’ but rather, ‘as Austin, a lingering-out sweet skill’” ( M L A , 71). This reinforces one of my deepest convictions: that scholars of the early church should reserve some of their professional time regularly for reading modern literature.

public a’nd private selves, their own deep Gots and stray details. This is, indeed, a fundamental challenge he poses in his most sustained treatment of method, the first chapter of Religion and Socit?y.

In this chapter Brown tells how his interests and con- cerns, as reflected in the collected articles, developed. There was “the pressure of obscure if tenacious preoccupations” which appears in retrospect as an “unpremeditated conver- gence on biography” (RS, 9). Throughout the work on the studies he had come to see that “debates of ordinary men as to who they were, to whom they would be loyal, where they felt they belonged, whom they were prepared to accept, and whom they would persist in rejecting” molded the fate of the Roman Empire (RS, 15). Then, the throwing down of the gauntlet: “The historian of religion, precisely because he is a historian of religion, must keep his eyes firmly on the ground” (RS, 17).

What Brown then goes on to say about the shaping of his consciousness is, among things I have read, the only evocation of the experience of doing history that I put on a par with the “Prelude” to Thomas Mann’s Joseph and his Brothers. ( I would in fact propose that Brown’s chapter and Mann’s prelude be required reading at the start of every historical seminar.) Brown notes that the historian, while still treasuring the craft’s tradition of “traveling light,” must reach out to other disciplines, especially psychology, an- thropology, and sociology: Far too often, I have found myself dealing with phenomena which I do not readily understand in the world around me, and in myself, any more than I do in the distant past. T o understand such things, I have found that I had frequently to reach out for help from other disciplines. . . . The difficulty of understanding the past begins with the present.

However, tacking one discipline onto another will not do. The building-up of a historical “culture” is a slower and more painful affair. It does not begin with understanding the past, but with opening oneself to the present. It involves containing, in oneself, the confusion and dismay that ensue from the rejection of stereotypes, and from the tentative and hotly-debated elaboration of new ways of understanding human affairs. It is only when the insights of other disciplines have worked themselves into his mind, so that they help him to read his newspapers and to listen to conversations in a ’bus queue, that the historian can bring them to the study of the past (RS, 18-20).

WHAT DOES I T COME TO?

Brown’s prescription for a historical culture is too powerful medicine for most of us, but we need to take as large doses of it as we can, and start administering it to our students; at the very least, we ought periodically to let ourselves be startled at the fundamentally mysterious activity that doing history and/or being human is. There is some comfort in recogniz- ing that not everything Brown does is touched with magic (although he can in turn take comfort from the fact that even when he is wrong he is more interesting than some tamer historians when they are right). He wrote The World of

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96 1 Religious Studies Review Vol. 6, No. 2 1 April 1980

Late Antiquity too soon, Two hundred pages for six centuries means that for the period up to 450, where he had prepared himself step-by-step, he does not have enough scope, and some of his judgments are squeezed, while for the subse- quent period his treatment, despite characteristic illumina- tions, is surprisingly old hat. The flaws in that book are themselves indirect testimony to the immensity of the over- all task Brown has set fiimself.

The sureness of t h c h in his most recent book, The Making of Late Antiquity, is entirely warranted, but could be dangerous. Brown is on to something fundamental in his analysis of the rise to prominence of a class of holy men; the category of power accounts for much. But while I do not expect Brown to go riding off in a cocked hat, he must remember now and again to stable his hobby-horse.

It is not too much to say that the Augustine book stands at the pinnacle of Late Antiquity/Early Christianity studies of the past several decades. All biographers must have some affinity with their subjects; that Brown was such a “right” biographer for Augustine says a lot about Brown’s stature as scholar and person. To spread the method which brings Augustine so vividly to life across a much wider landscape is a daring, risky business. It does not always work, but Brown has already demonstrated great flexibility and versatility. Perhaps the greater risk would be to suspect that he cannot pull it off.

Whatever Brown may subsequently write, I do not ex- pect anything to surpass in power chapter fifteen, “The Lost Future,” of Augustine of Hippo. Here Brown specifies what the conversion really meant: Augustine had come to see that we are “bound by the continuities of [our] inner life” (AH, 149). And in a passage to which I have gone repeatedly to help make sense of many facets of my experience, Brown sums up the Augustinian sensibility: If to be a “Romantic,” means to be a man acutely aware of being caught in an existence that denies him the fullness for which he craves, to feel that he is defined by his tension towards something else, by his capacity for faith, for hope, for longing, to think of himself as a wanderer seeking a country that is always distant, but made ever-present by the quality of the love that “groans” for it, then Augustine has imperceptibly become a “Romantic” ( A H , 156).

It is the notion that a quality of love can make the unseen present that haunts me.

What will come next? A biography of Justinian? A broadened, more nuanced, and better differentiated World of Late Antiquity? A full-scale history of the split in religious sentiment between Eastern and Western Christianity? Brown is productive enough to do all these eventually. But maybe there will be something else. Brown has wondered publicly whether “the time may well have come for a mod- ern version of Lecky’s History ofEuropean Morals” ( R S , 334). I think it has, and Brown is preeminently up to a task which would not be far behind the City of God as an opus magnum et arduum. It is hard to imagine a study which could help us as much to understand who, what, where, when, and why we are.

To conclude with a stray thought. Brown suspects the world is pretty much the way Augustine says it is, though he would prefer it to be more nearly like what Plotinus says it is; but if the “passionately maintained equipoise” of Plotinus

( WLA, 74) is finally untenable, then Augustine’s “Romanti- cism,” in which Plotinus is subjected to churning waves from below and stormclouds from above, makes for what the Greeks called a deuteros plous-“the next best voyage.”

REFERENCES

WORKS BY PETER BROWN AH 1967 Augustine of Hippo: A Biography. London: Faber and

Faber; Stanford University Press. MLA 1978 The Making of Late Antiquzty. Carl Newell Jackson

Lectures. Harvard University Press. RS 1972 Religion and Society in the Age of Saznt Augustzne.

Harper & Row. SC 1975 A Socuzl Context to the Religious Crisis of the Third

Century A.D. Center for Hermeneutical Studies in Hellenis- tic and Modern Culture (Berkeley, CA). 1971 The World of Late Antiquity AD 150-750. History of European Civilization Library. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.

WLA

THE MAKING OF LATE ANTIQUITY By Peter Brown Carl Newell Jackson Lectures Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978 Pp. xii + 135. $12.50

Reviewer: Mary Douglas Russell Sage Foundation 230 Park Avenue New York, IVY 1001 7

The history of the second to the fourth centuries of late antiquity can be seen as a debate on the nature of the Holy. The debate itself is a part of a political movement that reaches its peak in the sixth century. As the political action unfolds, men accept or reject the options before them. They press for advancement, they either displace their rivals or are themselves routed. The outcomes change the character of social life in villages and towns. With each new phase in the political history, people make different appeals to the supernatural powers around them, so that the face of supernatural changes, decade by decade.

This is the outline of an anthropologist’s reading of The Making of Late Antiquity. The assumptions are familiar and well-established. No anthropologist can go into fieldwork with one ear listening for a debate about political power and the other ear cocked to catch a separate debate about spirituality. If anthropology has anything to say to history, it is to suggest that the spiritual beings in which people believe are not interesting to the believers in an academic or theoret- ical sense. They are interesting at a particular time because they can credibly intervene in particular ways. They can back a threat, punish impiety, see into the future, and warn of dangers. If the believers stop wishing to threaten, punish or warn each other in these ways, the spiritual beings be- come otiose and their cult languishes. This sounds so obvi- ous that one would hardly think it worth repeating. How- ever, among the many kinds of historians some are not convinced that this point of view, faithfully followed, will yield good insight into acomplex period. All right for simple spear-and-arrow cultures in Africa that beliefs should be