Journeys of the Mind: A Life in History
by Peter Brown.
Princeton University Press, 713 pp., $45.00
A man looks back on half a life, beginning with his childhood, his schooling, and his higher education. As a student he is absorbed by theological questions, and for many years he rejects the Christian faith of his youth before eventually returning to the church. In the meantime we hear of his migrations as an illustrious teacher between cities on two continents, and the narrative ends with his mother’s death.
This is a famous story, but it is no longer Saint Augustine’s alone: the renowned medieval historian (and frequent contributor to these pages) Peter Brown hews close to Augustine’s Confessions of 397 CE in his own more entertaining memoir, Journeys of the Mind. And however deliberately Brown draws them out, there are uncanny parallels between these two lives lived 1,500 years apart.
Augustine reports in the autobiographical sketch he wrote in his early forties that he went to school first in his hometown of Thagaste (in modern Algeria), then in Madauros, a day’s journey south. Brown describes his studies first at a prep school in Bray, just south of Dublin, and then at Shrewsbury, a private boarding school in England—a ferry and a train ride away. Both Brown and Augustine then spent a year back home before going to university, Augustine because his father needed to save the money to send him to study at Carthage, Brown because he was still too young to start at Oxford—although he notes the opportunity it afforded his father to save a year’s school fees.
His family’s financial challenges are a constant theme in Brown’s early chapters, along with the sacrifices they made for his education in England. He was a superb student: after graduating with the top first in history in 1956, he remained at Oxford as a prize fellow at All Souls College, the best research fellowship in the world then as now, because it lasts seven years and comes without teaching requirements. Brown taught all the same—one of the many things you warm to in; Brown’s was the biography (1967).
