Peter Brown on the lessons of the past

The longtime Philip and Beulah Rollins Professor of History at Princeton, now retired, Peter Brown is credited with creating “late antiquity” as a field of study. He wrote the classic biography Augustine of Hippo and many other influential books. He commented on the application of the past in an interview with Nawal Arjini in a mailing from The New York Review of Books.

The interviewer asks Brown about the contemporary relevance of the history he studies.

Events around us undoubtedly sensitize us to what seem to be similar situations in the past — they add a sense of weight and human urgency to what we read. But that is all. The historian’s job is about the past, and especially about how and why the past is not the present.

People in history are usually most interesting to us when they are not like us. Like good friends they complement us rather than act as clones of ourselves. The past has an integrity of its own, and historical knowledge can best serve the present by preserving this integrity, not least by widening the imagination and by insisting on the complexity of historical change.

To take an example: when people tell me that the negative changes of our own time are similar to those that led to the decline and fall of the Roman Empire — as if the one was a distant mirror of the other — I notice that the changes which they tend to isolate have little to do with the Roman Empire as it really was, and a lot to do with what they dislike in their own society.  . . .

Next: Dietrich Bonhoeffer on marginalizing God