Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Peter Brown
Read between
January 10 - January 11, 2019
For, like God, the poor were very distant. Like God, the poor were silent. Like God, the poor could all too easily be forgotten by the proud and the wealthy.
The rich would forget the poor. The living would forget the dead. And God would forget them all.
The crucial issue was how best to express solidarity with the dead. In this, the practice of intercessory prayer was decisive.
But to forget either the dead or the poor was doubly abhorrent to religious groups, such as Jews and Christians, whose worst fear was that their God might forget them.
still a Christianity of waiting souls.
they reveal that the living prayed intently to be remembered by the dead.
notions of the working of memory that are different from our own.
assert a bond; it was to be loyal and to pay attention to somebody. Memory was as much a gift to the potentially forgotten dead in the other world as almsgiving was a gift to the all-too-easily forgotten poor in this world.
To forget was an aggressive act. It was an act of social excision that severed links that had previously been established by an equally purposive act of memory.
the intensity with which the Christians who wrote these graffiti linked memory with intercession.
belief in the power of intercessory prayer accounts for much of the authority of Christian bishops and of Christian holy men and women throughout the late antique period.
In the Christian imagination, the silent flow of intercessory prayer wrapped even the most low-profile Christian community in a perpetual flicker of divine power.
the principal aim of intercession of all kinds was to hold together entities that common sense treated as incommensurable.
The flexing of the muscles of memory joined the dead to the living and God to humankind in an intense bond.
the Christian community as a place where social boundaries were relaxed, both in this world and in the next.
countercultural longing for a religious community that avoided, as much as possible, the blatant hierarchies and abrasive differences in wealth and status that characterized the dark “world” outside the church.37
it caused well-to-do Christians to work even harder in their imaginations to overcome divisions of which they were only too well aware.
through an intense work of intercessory prayer and almsgiving, to join a series of mighty incommensurables—God and man, heaven and earth, rich and poor, living and dead.
The saints were no longer seen as partners in prayer. They became patroni—“patron saints”—
They stood as intercessors between the average believers and God, much as great noblemen, as patrons and protectors, represented their submissive clients at the court of the emperor.
it became easier to see almsgiving as a purely expiatory action that involved little or no bonding with the poor themselves.
Dead and living also drifted apart.
the gradual penetration of Latin theology by Platonic ideas
But the members of the Christian aristocracy of fourth-century Rome were not prepared to mark time in this manner.
From the time of Augustine onward, believers were encouraged to be more conscious of the burden of their sins.
average Christians felt further away from heaven than ever before. Their souls were imagined to travel more slowly and at ever-greater risk—past demons and through flames of fire—toward an increasingly distant heaven.
Augustine’s answer—deeply pondered after thirty years of meditation and of pastoral work—was the opposite of Mani’s.
Augustine presents us with the immense silence of God.
The note of anxiety that accompanied the questions posed to Mani by his lay followers was widespread in Christianity as a whole.
The questions came especially from the rich; or, at least, they concerned the rich. The rich, after all, had more treasure on earth than anyone else.
His insistence that the giving of alms was intimately related to the expiation of sins would become dominant in future centuries.
a highly educated man surrounded by a circle of well-to-do questioners.
Augustine and his questioners were a small, self-chosen group.
Altogether, as every archaeologist knows, the dead speak to us only because of the money provided by the living.
the grooming of the religious imagination of vocal and influential members of the Christian communities all over Africa and, eventually, elsewhere.
Christ was expected to look like an emperor and to act like an emperor.
like Oakland as described by Gertrude Stein: “There’s no there there.”
Africa was a land awash with dreams.
The notion that religious actions took place at the prompting of God or the gods through dreams and waking visions was shared by pagans and Christians alike.
Such visions were epistemologically improbable.
What benefits did the souls of the departed derive from the actions of the living?
Altogether, Paulinus’s newly built shrine of Saint Felix was an advertisement to the power of religious giving, now practiced by a formidably wealthy Christian aristocracy.
what the discreet weight of wealth could do to mold Christian views of the afterlife,
But this was not Augustine’s view of the matter. The treatise that he wrote to Paulinus, de cura pro mortuis gerenda—“What Care Should Be Taken for the Dead”—was discreet, firm, and (like his answer to Evodius) deeply discouraging.
But the cost of such burial alone ensured that these were privileged burials, and that “holy space” was blatantly the space of the rich.
Prayer, almsgiving, and offering at the Eucharist were not expensive:
These actions alone—and not fancy tombs—had the power to alter the fate of the dead.
To be remembered in that way was all that her soul required.
For Jews and Christians alike, almsgiving for the remission of sins had involved the perpetual circulation of wealth within the religious community for the benefit of the poor.
But why, in the first place, should the emphasis on almsgiving to the poor be so charged in Augustine’s Africa?
