Through the Eye of a Needle

Metadata

Author: Peter Brown
Full Title: Through the Eye of a Needle
Category: #books

Highlights

Renunciation of wealth was not the only act on which the hand of God rested. Gifts to the poor, donations to the church, weekly offerings, offerings for the payment of vows: each and all joined heaven and earth in ways that were all the more deeply installed in the consciousness of believers for not being exhaustively analyzed.
Those who shied away from or who toned down the command of Jesus to the Rich Young Man were not mere shirkers. Rather, they had surrounded their use of wealth with a different imaginative charge from that of the advocates of radical renunciation. This charge empowered their daily acts of kindness and generosity. It was from this rich imaginative humus, common both to the wealthy and to distinctly ordinary persons, that the wealth of the church sprang.
the change from a religion whose giving practices had once been focused on the economy of a vast Hellenistic temple—the Temple of Jerusalem—to the low-profile but tenacious giving habits of synagogues and of Jewish communities scattered throughout the Roman world.
The seemingly straightforward history of the relationship between bishops, clergy, and laity in the fourth, fifth, and sixth centuries was played out against the shadow of an alternative ordering of the Christian community. This was a household-based Christianity in which bishops and clergymen played a less prominent role than they might have wished. It was a tenacious alternative that did not vanish in the bright new dawn of the Constantinian age. Private Christian cult continued to take various forms long after the official recognition of the Christian church and its leaders and the consequent consolidation of the power of the bishops. It took forms that ranged from pious groups assembled around favored teachers in the palaces and villas of the rich to chapels set up beside family mausolea in the depths of great estates. Throughout this book we shall follow a constant, muffled dialogue between the public church and more private, “unchurched” forms of Christianity that lasted up to the end of the sixth century.
a rhetorical education brought its full weight to bear on issues of personal behavior. Put bluntly: to the ancients, how individuals acted mattered far more than did the structures within which they acted.