Idioms of improvement Book

This slim volume brings together three lectures given by Brown on the subject of the "Christianisation" of the later Roman Empire. Brown looks at the symbolic systems in use by the Roman elites, conceptions of authority, and the roles of Christian holy men, and challenges the neat and accepted historical narrative of Christianity triumphing over and absorbing a moribund paganism. Rather, he shows a late antique world in which Christians and pagans negotiated a compromise between the new faith and long-standing ways of seeing the world, and often possessed multiple, overlapping world views. That compromise, moreover, was often not worked out merely in terms of religious syncretism, but in terms of power'the Christian holy man derived his power not because he appropriated pagan religious forms, but because of how he presented himself as a parallel of Roman secular authority'the administrator, the paterfamilias.

Brown also cautions against using the rhetoric of philosophers and theologians as a means of assessing the relative power, or lack thereof, of the two major religious groupings. He points out that such groups were elites, often deliberately withdrawn from the concerns of the secular mundus and thus cannot be taken as representative of how the majority of people conceived of their faith.

As erudite and as beautifully written as always, Authority and the Sacred is perhaps not one of Brown's most groundbreaking of books, but it is still well worth the read if one has even the most passing of interests in the subject.