In the later Roman Empire, great wealth has been more often denounced than understood. Peter Brown's cogent and engaging study seeks to rectify this imbalance by examining the impact of wealth on the Christian churches of the Latin West between the fourth and sixth centuries. In so doing, he challenges a vision advanced by late ancient ascetics and modern scholars alike, which sees the radical repudiation of wealth as the test of a true Christian—a test that the affluent by definition fail. Brown argues instead that the “imagined course of wealth from earth to heaven through humdrum acts of pious giving was just as important to Christian believers as was the occasional act of renunciation among the few” (p. xxv). The charitable giving of the moneyed classes represented more than just a compromise stranding them on the wrong end of the narrow path that led to eternal life; it constituted a moral economy that helped refashion the ancient world into that of the Middle Ages.

A current of profound discomfort with worldly prosperity wound its way through the early church. By c. 370, though, representatives of the better-heeled echelons of late Roman society—small-time town councilors, arrivistes with fortunes grounded in imperial service, even some of the super-rich—began to infuse Western churches with new wealth and talent. As Brown compellingly demonstrates, the resulting struggle to maintain cohesion in the Christian community sparked an explosive debate about wealth that was to last for sixty years. In this debate, the fundamental assumption that the prosperous should dedicate at least a portion of their riches to do work in the world was not in question. Rather, at issue was how much they should give, and to whom. Over the course of time, longstanding pagan traditions of civic giving were redirected and refocused by a Christian ideology that emphasized the salvific power of giving to the poor. Critically, Brown emphasizes, donations of this sort were within the means of believers from a wide social spectrum. On the receiving end, the truly destitute found themselves in competition with the “holy poor”—churches, monastic communities, charismatic spiritual advisers—for the resources of their more fortunate co-religionists, whether disbursed in the flood of dramatic renunciation or the steady trickle of regular almsgiving. In general, Brown shows, Western society developed a greater level of comfort with Christian wealth as the economic prosperity and political cohesion of the empire dissipated in the crisis years of the fifth century. In the later fifth and sixth centuries, the impoverishment of the old landowning classes left churches as the most affluent segments of society, and administrator-bishops and their clerical staffs went about consolidating and managing the wealth they now controlled on behalf of the “poor,” sanctified as it was by the charge of working the salvation of lay donors.

Throughout his study, Brown's characteristic erudition, insight, and compassion are on full display. In his perspicacious vision, great wealth could be a dangerous thing in late antiquity, for its owners made tempting targets in unquiet times. Struggles over giving also prove to have underlain and informed developments ranging from the Pelagian controversy over grace and free will to the execution of the Spanish theologian Priscillian to Jerome's flight from Rome to Jerusalem under a cloud of sexual innuendo. The senatorial aristocracy did not easily acquiesce to the pontifical bid for control of the Eternal City in the fifth and sixth centuries, but rather fought tooth and nail to retain their patronage of the urban populace. Even the outspoken social critic Salvian of Marseille was less concerned with the fate of peasants and the urban poor than he was with the effects of imperial taxation on members of his own social order. Again and again, Brown guides us through well-known landscapes, only to reveal new and hitherto unsuspected vistas.

The study also raises a number of issues that will reward future research. Figures with eastern ties like Jerome bridged the two halves of the later Roman Empire and serve as reminders both of the wealth that flowed back and forth between East and West and of very different attitudes to wealth and poverty that developed in the East, but that go largely (and self-consciously) unexplored here. Brown's study is also a striking reminder of just how difficult it is to see and hear the economically most disadvantaged segments of late Roman society—those who not only have no voice of their own in the surviving texts, but did not even garner the interest of those who do—and serves to underscore the importance of approaching these crucial populations through the material evidence.

All in all, Brown's study represents a spectacular achievement, one that asks the most fundamental questions of the late ancient world, and offers nothing less than an electrifying vision in return.