Through the Eye of a Needle: Wealth, the Fall of Rome, and the Making of Christianity in the West, 350-550 AD
(eBook)

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    [year] => 2013
    [artist] => Peter Brown
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    [language] => ENGLISH
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    [title] => Through the Eye of a Needle
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    [synopsis] => "Winner of the 2013 Philip Schaff Prize, American Society of Church History" "Winner of the 2013 Jacques Barzun Prize in Cultural History, American Philosophical Society" "Winner of the 2012 R. R. Hawkins Award, PROSE Awards, Association of American Publishers" "Winner of the 2012 Award for Excellence in Humanities, Association of American Publishers" "Winner of the 2012 Gold Medal Book of the Year Award, History category, ForeWord Reviews" "Winner of the 2012 PROSE Award in Classics & Ancient History, Association of American Publishers" "One of Bloomberg's Best Books of 2016" "One of Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles for 2013" "Honorable Mention for the 2013 Cundill Prize in Historical Literature, McGill University" Peter Brown is the Philip and Beulah Rollins Professor of History Emeritus at Princeton University. His many books include The World of Late Antiquity, The Rise of Western Christendom, and Augustine of Hippo. 
	A sweeping intellectual history of the role of wealth in the church in the last days of the Roman Empire

Jesus taught his followers that it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a 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, written by the world's foremost scholar of late antiquity.

Peter Brown examines the rise of the church through the lens of money and the challenges it posed to an institution that espoused the virtue of poverty and called avarice the root of all evil. Drawing on the writings of major Christian thinkers such as Augustine, Ambrose, and Jerome, Brown examines the controversies and changing attitudes toward money caused 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 beset 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 their money in hopes of treasure in heaven.

Through the Eye of a Needle challenges the widely held notion that Christianity's growing wealth sapped Rome of its ability to resist the barbarian invasions, and offers a fresh perspective on the social history of the church in late antiquity. "To compare it with earlier surveys of this period is to move from the X-ray to the cinema. . . . Every page is full of information and argument, and savoring one's way through the book is an education. It is a privilege to live in an age that could produce such a masterpiece of the historical literature."---Garry Wills, New York Review of Books "[O]utstanding. . . . Brown lays before us a vast panorama of the entire culture and society of the late Roman west."---Peter Thornemann, Times Literary Supplement "[I]t's the gloriously ambitious panorama of Through the Eye of a Needle that most impresses. This is a book written in Cinemascope, and like the best intellectual and social history it features a polyphony of voices."---Christopher Kelly, London Review of Books "[M]agisterial. . . . The formidably learned historian challenges commonly accepted notions about the role of wealth in the decline of the Roman empire and examines the roots of charity, two subjects relevant to contemporary economics."---Marcia Z. Nelson, Publishers Weekly "It is exciting to watch a historian who has already written so extensively on Late Antiquity absorb so much new scholarship, revise his old reviews, and re-imagine the world we thought we knew from him. . . . Through the Eye of a Needle is a tremendous achievement, even for a scholar who has already achieved so much. Its range is as vast as its originality, and readers will find everywhere the kinds of memorable aperçus and turns of phrase for which its author i
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    [subtitle] => Wealth, the Fall of Rome, and the Making of Christianity in the West, 350-550 AD
    [publisher] => Princeton University Press
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