This book explores the social and imaginative history behind the notion of the “holy poor” in early Near Eastern Christianity and seeks to explain divergent attitudes toward manual labor in Syrian and Egyptian monastic traditions of the fourth and fifth centuries. Brown proposes that the metaphor “treasure in heaven” carried weight in this era because its joining of material and spiritual realms offered a social model in which wealth could be used to harmonize rich with poor and human with divine. He contextualizes Paul's claim to have supported himself by work (Acts 20:33–35) and his collection for the saints within a general “democratization of . . . religious leadership” (12) in which low-status people, liberated by Roman prosperity in the first and second centuries, began joining previously elite ranks of spiritual teachers and religious entrepreneurs. In Mediterranean churches this eventually gave rise to episcopally mediated systems of religious giving designed to generate salaries for the increasingly professionalized holy poor (clerics) and alms for the real poor, while protecting both from obligations towards donors—an aspect of Greco-Roman patronage that troubled contemporary rabbis as well. Meanwhile, direct giving became the norm in Manichaean communities, whose ascetic elect ingested the sustenance they received from donors, transmuting their material gifts “into treasuries . . . in the heights” (44). Though inspired by dualist cosmology, this approach reflected a more general “Syrian Way” (53), exemplified by the fourth-century Liber Graduum, that identified manual labor and the acquisition of property with the Fall, a condition which Christian perfectionists might transcend by devoting themselves to prayer (the work of angels), abstaining from physical toil, and relying on gifts from lay admirers. These Mediterranean and Syro-Mesopotamian systems all presumed the correctness of a model of “spiritual exchange” by which lay Christians provided holy poor exemplars with material support in return for edification. This left a lasting imprint in Syria, where monks like Symeon Stylites lived “like angels” on lay donations to the end of antiquity.

In Egypt, Brown explores the emergence of a different conception of holy poverty. Here monks were depicted as working constantly to support themselves and others. Bolstered by an esteem for labor that went back to Pharaonic times and a physicality characteristic of Coptic Christianity, this approach to work was devised to distinguish Egyptian monks from their Syrian counterparts, to ensure that monks “carried with them a reassuring smell of humanity” (97), and to remedy the fact that local Egyptian churches “had no organized system of support for the poor” (104). It fostered unique cohesion between Egyptian monks, clerics, and laity; had it not arisen, Christian monasticism in Europe might have been characterized, like Buddhism, by forms of religious mendicancy long before the appearance of Francis of Assisi.

Based on the James W. Richard Lectures he delivered at the University of Virginia in 2012, this volume, especially its chapters on Syrian and Manichaean asceticism, draws on Brown's earlier work on wealth and poverty, as well as on such scholarship as Philippe Escolan's Monachisme et Église (Éditions Beauchesne, 1999) and my own Wandering, Begging Monks: Spiritual Authority and the Promotion of Monasticism in Late Antiquity (University of California Press, 2002). Brown's accessible introduction makes at least three singular contributions: it foregrounds the different trajectories that early monasticism took in Syria and Egypt, it shows how Christian debates on ascetic work reflected different anthropologies as well as different economic and social developments, and it emphasizes that physical toil defined most people's existence and was considered the true essence of poverty in antiquity.

Though characteristically engaging, Brown at times glosses over or reduces the complexity of the issues involved. This is not unexpected in a collection of general lectures, but it is worth noting. For example, the literature that attests what Brown calls “the Syrian Way” regularly presents itself as promoting an apostolic lifestyle based on Jesus's life and sayings (e.g. Matt. 6:26–34, Luke 10:1–13, 38–42). Early “Syrian” modes of spiritual exchange were thus inspired by an apostolic paradigm as much as by an anthropological or angelic paradigm; in fact, it was the Gospel-based, apostolic pretensions of its ascetic practitioners that most demonstrably caused this paradigm to be marginalized by church authorities and their monastic allies in the post-Constantinian era (as did indeed happen, despite what is implied on 110). Furthermore, this literature (especially the Liber Graduum) justified this paradigm by assuming that Jesus must be interpreted literally and any contradictions of Paul's, figuratively; thus we confront an early approach to Christian hermeneutics as much as any distinct “Syrian” model. Indeed, this explains why the paradigm is attested not only in Syria, but in western communities as well: there is no evidence that Carthaginian monks criticized by Augustine in his On the Work of Monks were “loyal to Syrian models” (65).

Regarding early Egyptian tradition, Arthur Urbino, Samuel Rubenson, and others have established that the Life of Antony, the Apophthegmata Patrum, and outside accounts are more problematic witnesses to Egyptian attitudes and practices than Brown discusses. That the Life (and traits attributed to Antony) was deliberately written by Athanasius as an inversion of the Life of Pythagoras, that the Apophthegmata were produced as thought-exercises in Palestinian monasteries, complicates our understanding of Egyptian ascetics themselves. Oddly, Brown also makes little use of Pachomian cenobitic tradition, which depicts manual labor as a method of maintaining solidarity within monastic communities (and criticizes anchorites for being served by others). Recent research also suggests that Egyptian villages’ churches may well have had organized systems of charity (see Adam Serfass, “Wine for Widows,” in Wealth and Poverty in Early Church and Society, ed. Susan Holman [Baker Academic, 2008], 88–102). Such insights, along with the seeming similarity of Syrian village churches, reduce the pertinence of this facet of Brown's argument for the emergence of a distinctive Egyptian ascetic model. Brown also does not explain how or why this Egyptian model (if we should call it that) took hold outside Egypt.

These nuances await readers who follow Brown's references. In the rest of the book they will find an evocative and provocative overview of a fascinating issue in early and late antique Christianity.