The Ransom of the Soul
Afterlife and Wealth in Early Western Christianity
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- $24.99
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- $24.99
Publisher Description
A Choice Outstanding Academic Title of the Year
A Tablet Book of the Year
Marking a departure in our understanding of Christian views of the afterlife from 250 to 650 CE, The Ransom of the Soul explores a revolutionary shift in thinking about the fate of the soul that occurred around the time of Rome’s fall. Peter Brown describes how this shift transformed the Church’s institutional relationship to money and set the stage for its domination of medieval society in the West.
“[An] extraordinary new book…Prodigiously original—an astonishing performance for a historian who has already been so prolific and influential…Peter Brown’s subtle and incisive tracking of the role of money in Christian attitudes toward the afterlife not only breaks down traditional geographical and chronological boundaries across more than four centuries. It provides wholly new perspectives on Christianity itself, its evolution, and, above all, its discontinuities. It demonstrates why the Middle Ages, when they finally arrived, were so very different from late antiquity.”
—G. W. Bowersock, New York Review of Books
“Peter Brown’s explorations of the mindsets of late antiquity have been educating us for nearly half a century…Brown shows brilliantly in this book how the future life of Christians beyond the grave was influenced in particular by money.
—A. N. Wilson, The Spectator
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this brilliant, brief, and densely elegant study in the history of ideas, Brown (Through the Eye of a Needle), a renowned scholar of early Christian history, vividly illustrates the complex evolution of ideas about wealth and its role in the afterlife from the Christianity of the second century to the seventh century C.E. The early third-century theologian Tertullian teaches that souls do not go to heaven at death but they experience a time of refreshment as they prepare to move on. During this period, the dead were still close to the living, so surviving family members could help the deceased be more comfortable by offering a communion meal for them. By the fourth century, Brown shows, the wealthy sought to protect the souls of the deceased, and donated money to secure burial tombs close to the shrines of the martyrs. By the sixth and seventh centuries, the practice of remembering the departed develops into the building of magnificent monasteries and shrines. Brown lucidly reveals the details and personalities of these centuries as he continually articulates the dynamic character of early Christianity.
