Peter Brown, The Ransom of the Soul: Afterlife and Wealth in Early Western Christianity (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Harvard U. Press, 2015) (From the book jacket: "Early Christian doctrine held that the living and the dead, as equally sinful beings, needed each other in order to achieve redemption. The devotional intercessions of the living could tip the balance between heaven and hell for the deceased. In the third century, money began to play a decisive role in these practices, as wealthy Christians took ever more elaborate steps to protect their own souls and the souls of their loved ones in the afterlife. They secured privileged burial sites and made lavish donations to churches. By the seventh century, Europe was dotted with richly endowed monasteries and funerary chapels displaying in marble splendor the Christian devotion of the wealthy dead." "In response to the growing influence of money, Church doctrine concerning the afterlife evolved from speculation to firm reality, and personal wealth in the pursuit or redemption led to extraordinary feats of architecture and acts of generosity. But it also prompted stormy debates about money's proper use--debates that resonated through the centuries and kept alive the fundamental question of how heaven and earth could be joined by human agency.").
Peter Brown, The Rise of Western Christendom: Triumph and Diversity, A.D. 200-1000 , Tenth Anniversary Revised Edition (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013) ("This is a book which attempts to set Western Europe itself against a wider world. It is most important that this should be so. [T]hroughout this period the Christianity of what we now call Europe was only the westernmost variant of a far wider Christian world, whose center of gravity lay, rather, the the eastern Mediterranean and in the Middle East." "Throughout this period, the East Roman empire--what we now call the 'Byzantine' empire--did not remain a remote and unchanging presence of little relevance to the emergence of Latin Catholic Christianity. [F]or centuries after the fall of the Roman empire of the West, the eastern empire remained a constant military presence in the western Mediterranean, as s was shown by the conquest of the empire Justinian and by the subsequent tenacity of the Byzantine holding in Italy, in African and even, for a shorter period, in Spain." "For the entire period between A.D. 535 and 800, Rome was a frontier city. It lay on the western periphery of a great, eastern empire. Every document which the popes issued, at that time, was dated according to the reigns of East Roman rules who rose and fell over 1,3000 miles away, in Constantinople (modern Istanbul), and whose careers were determined not by events in western Europe, but by what happened along the eastern stretches of the Danube on the steppe of the Ukraine, in Iran, and in the Arabian peninsula." "The eastern empire (and not Rome) lay at the hub of a worldwide Christianity, which stretched as far into Asia as it did into Europe. As in a great echo chamber,the theological issues which were debated most fiercely in Constantinople, Alexandria, and Antioch in the fifth and sixth centuries . . . resounded for centuries in the West. They resounded, indeed, wherever Christians had occasion to think about the relation between God and humankind, whether this was in the monasteries of Ireland and southern Scotland, in the Caucasus, in Mesopotamia, or even in the western capital of the Chinese empire at Hsian-fu." "And it is important to realize that Christianity of the eastern empire was not a static matter, I was in a state of constant Change." [] "Last but not least, the rise of Islam and the consequent conquest and conversion to the new faith of most of the Middle east, of North Africa, and even, for half a millennium, of southern Spain, seems to place an insuperable imaginative barrier between ourselves and an ancient Christian world where North Africa, Egypt, and Syria had been the most populous and crevice regions of the Christian world. But Islam did not come form nowhere. Nor did it instantly blot out all that had come before it. . . . Islam emerged in an Arabian environment thoroughly penetrated by Christian and Jewish ideas. Far from bringing the ancient world to an abrupt end, Islamic culture and Islamic theology developed in constant, mute debate with Jews and with Christians who remained in the majority among the inhabitants of the Middle East for centuries after the Arab conquest." Id at 2-3.).
Peter Brown, Through the Eye of a Needle: Wealth, the Fall of Rome, and the Making of Christianity in the West, 350-550 AD (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 2013) (From the book jacket: "Jesus taught his followers that is easier for a camel to go through the eye of needle than for a rich man to enter heaven. Yet by the fall of Rome, the church was becoming rich beyond measure. Through the Eye of a Needle is a sweeping intellectual and social history of the vexing problem of wealth in Christianity in the waning days of the Roman Empire . . . " "Peter Brown examines the rise of the church through the lens of money and the challenges posed to an institution that espoused the virtue of poverty and called avarice the root of all evil. [] Brown examines the controversies and changing attitudes toward money cause by the influx of new wealth into church coffers, and describes the spectacular acts of divestment by rich donors and their growing influence in an empire best with crisis. He shows how the use of wealth for the care of the poor competed with older forms of philanthropy deeply rooted in the Roman world, and sheds light on the ordinary people who gave away money in hopes of treasures in heaven." "Thought the Eye of a Needle challenges the widely he'd notion that Christianity's growing wealth sapped Rome of its ability to edit the barbarian invasions, and offers a fresh perspective on the social history of the church in late antiquity.").
