Journeys of the Mind: A Life in History: an overlooked Irish intellectual

Peter Brown is the pre-eminent living scholar of the era known as Late Antiquity – roughly the period between AD 200 and 700. He did not invent the field, but he has achieved a prominence in it which is rare in any other area of scholarship today. The author of more than a dozen pioneering works, from a biography of St Augustine to an exploration of late Classical attitudes to sexuality, his insights and learning have transformed the study of an era frequently seen as marginal and benighted.

It is not generally recognised, I think, even by those reasonably familiar with his work, that Brown is Irish – indeed, one of the most distinguished living Irish scholars in any field. Now in his late 80s, a professor emeritus at Princeton, he has just written a blockbuster intellectual autobiography Journeys of the Mind, whose early chapters, especially, contain much that is rather fascinating for Irish readers.

Brown was born in Dublin in 1935, the scion of an upper-middle-class Anglo-Irish Protestant family. As he amusingly notes, his birth was recorded both in The Irish and the Khartoum Times – maybe a unique event, though perhaps not. His father, James Lamont Brown, was a traffic manager in the Sudan railways and during the 1930s Brown spent some winters in Sudan and summers in Dublin. In the war years, of course, they were confined to Ireland: while his father stayed in Sudan, he and his mother lived in Bray.

There is much-absorbing information here about the Brown family history: it went through several vicissitudes that are historically instructive. But what Brown was most conscious of, growing up, was the reduced quality of the Protestant lives among which he dwelt: as he puts it eloquently (he is a very fine writer, both in this and other works): “So I grew up among people dressed in shabby tweed coats”. This strong sense of decline and fall (a leitmotif of these chapters) almost certainly, as he notes, influenced his intellectual attraction to the later Roman Empire – history has strange ways of working itself out.

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Brown is awfully good at catching the constraints imposed by the notions of shabby gentility in which a whole class is trapped: for instance, when Brown suggests hiring (and paying for) a nurse to care for his dying father, the family rule it out because they can’t easily obtain a supply of biscuits for her and it would be unthinkable to have a nurse without such a service. The account of his mother’s rather isolated widowhood – she died in 1987 – is also quite painful.

At the same time, Brown also testifies to qualities of humour, resilience and creativity within this enclave – the Yeatses were distantly related – and this again inflected his later approach to late antiquity, seeing in it qualities that had been previously largely overlooked.

Equally intriguing is Brown’s account of his time in Aravon school, Bray in the later 1940s. It had a monster – the word is not too strong – of a headmaster in Arthur Craig – they weren’t only on the Catholic side. But it also had the poet Monk Gibbon as Latin teacher. And the history teacher, Charles Bowlby, was quite a remarkable figure also. He instilled in Brown his first passion for the subject and was clearly an inspiring mentor. He was also, unfortunately, a person with a dodgy Fascist past, a close associate of William Joyce, Lord Haw-Haw, who of course had strong Irish connections. Certain odd remarks of Bowlby about the responsibility for the war did puzzle his pupils, but it was only later that the full extent of his Nazi past became clear.

Still, his influence was surprisingly offset by that of a Marxist ex-British army officer – another lesson, not lost on Brown, that people should not be pigeonholed on the basis of background.

The story of Brown’s Irish background is interwoven with other aspects of his life as the book goes on, especially, of course, his intellectual development, mostly in the US: his discovery of his chosen field, the gradual deepening of his understanding of the era and the sometimes radical conclusions he reached. It is not a full personal memoir: his somewhat colourful personal life (he was married three times) gets only cursory mention. But, unexpectedly, in addition to all that, Brown has made a valuable contribution to the history of Irish Protestantism, thereby adding an extra leaf to his already abundant laurels.