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

By: Peter Brown

Narrated by: Fleet Cooper

Length: 31 hrs and 15 mins

Publisher's summary

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.

©2012 Princeton University Press (P)2012 Audible, Inc.

Slow, plodding but very informative

There was a chance I was not going to finish this book because it was a little dry and there was so much necessary information the author was putting forth. But after listening I believe I am a better and informed Christian and would recommend the book with the caveat that it is a little difficult to really get into the book, in the beginning.
One of the things Peter Brown does well is provide a sense of the culture and environment people lived in for the modern reader. He made me realize my concepts of what was wealth and poverty did not match up to late Roman views of wealth, and the importance of citizenship, and poverty. He translates the past for the modern reader. Unfortunately it take a while to translate and can be a tad uninteresting.

fascinating study

Any additional comments?

This is one of those books that sheds an astonishing amount of light on the evolution of the western world, in politics, religion, and the distribution of power and of wealth. It's much less about how Christian doctrine changed the pagan world, than about how Christian doctrine evolved to co-opt pagan wealth and power structures, letting the church emerge as a temporal power in its own right. Along the way we get marvelous peeks at life in late antiquity which animate the whole narrative. I found this book fascinating, and perhaps recommended best for those with a taste for thorough historical documentation and methodical argument. Peter Brown is clearly a master of this period of Roman history, deeply familiar with the latest archeological and textual discoveries, allowing him to overturn many long held misconceptions.

A Remarkable Journey with an Amazing Guide

Where does Through the Eye of a Needle rank among all the audiobooks you’ve listened to so far?

This is a book of outstanding scholarship written with great clarity by one of the most knowledgable and trustworthy historians of the period of the late Roman empire. Brown uses the issue of wealth as a key to enter a complex social and religious world that saw the emergence of Christianity into the ancient hierarchies of power, prestige, and vast wealth that had powered the Roman empire for many centuries.
Brown's narrative is fascinating and relatively easy to follow and brings to life the variety of characters and interests of the period in a wonderfully vivid way. He leads the listener to understand the nuances of primary texts while evaluating many current debates among historians with a sure touch.
Brown writes as a person who has lived in the world he describes for many years and understands its nooks and crannies like a native. I emerged from the long journey with a tremendous sense of gratitude for Brown's guidance through an important historical period in which modern prejudices could easily distort my perceptions.

Which character – as performed by Fleet Cooper – was your favorite?

Cooper reads the book with great clarity and articulation. My only problem with the narration was that quite a number of the names of ancient people or texts or technical terms seemed mispronounced. It did not seem in keeping with the high scholarly quality of the book otherwise.

Any additional comments?

I highly recommend this work. It is very substantive and assumes that the listener has a basic knowledge of the period covered. But it certainly rewards careful listening.

Fascinating book, laughable narration

A great history of the late Empire and the development of the Church, using the lens of charitable donation. It helps if you know some basics about the history of the period, though -- this isn't a survey book for beginners. But the narrator was hilariously bad -- he fluctuated between classical and medieval pronunciation of Latin, his French sounded like Peter Sellers doing Inspector Clouseau, and even a lot of the English words were mispronounced.

a lot of history

interesting and very detailed in the early Roman church. a lot of history that helps are how the Catholic Church eas formed.

Awful narration; Peter Brown with flaws etc.

Usually the narration is an afterthought with any book, but in this case, it is the primary focus. Fleet Cooper mispronounces words in nearly every single sentence. He emphasizes almost every clause incorrectly. The book is full of phrases and quotations from different languages—especially French and Latin. Cooper not only mispronounces all of these in an egregious way, but puts on a faux Legolas/D&D elf voice whenever he quotes an ancient author. The mispronunciations aren't even consistent or on difficult words. Many could have been remedied with a minute of research or a single rehearsal before sending the audio to print. Ambrose is usually Ambróse, but sometimes Ámbrose. Cassiciacum is pronounced three different (not terribly similar ways) in the course of maybe 15 pages. If you didn't already know enough about Augustine's biography, you would not have been able to tell he was referring to the same place over and over again with different sounds starting with "C."

I don't blame Cooper for this (I may have done just as poorly), but my goodness did the producers mess up on choosing him for this assignment and not even giving enough time for rehearsal and training. And why did they do so? I understand that voice actors knowledgeable in patristic theology or Classical literature might be too rare to rope into this assignment, but at least get an English actor with some classical education, knowledge of French, and Christian culture. David Suchet, Derek Jacobi, Derek Perkins, and Phyllida Nash would all have done an excellent job—and many others besides. Someone who is seeing the name "St. Ambrose" for the first time while doing the final recording is not the right person for the job.

Other decisions with the production of this audiobook are dumbfounding. Someone in the boardroom thought it was a good idea to replace every instance of "book" in Peter's Brown's text with "audiobook" with the result that Brown describes himself sitting down to write his last audiobook and other such absurdities.

Voice acting aside, the book is about the diversity of views towards wealth in the early Church, mostly focusing on the 4th century. It begins with a lengthy study of how wealth was viewed outside the Church and of the basic structure of the economy in the Rome Empire. The rest looks at wealthy Christians and the wealth that back some of the Church Fathers. As Peter Brown tends to do, the book is a bit iconoclastic and something of a revisionist history. The goal is to question standard narratives about wealth in the early Church—such as the idea that the pagan world didn't care about the poor at all and that Christians invented social welfare and were a Church of poor monks serving the poor right from the outset. It succeeds in thoroughly demolishing this overly simplified picture and narrating something of the complex relationship and interplay between various levels of wealth and status in late ancient society and the young Church in different regions.

Peter Brown is one of the foremost scholars of late antiquity. I believe he is Catholic, and this is a scholarly book about economics. As such, it will be very dry to some—a point especially aggravated by the horrendous narration. While Brown is an excellent scholar drawing deeply from primary sources, he has his flaws that are on full display in this book. He sometimes goes so far to destroy preconceived notions about history that he indulges in pointless irreverence and cynicism and groundless psychological speculation.

My recommendation is: only purchase this book if you are already fairly familiar with the history of the early Church, late ancient Rome, and patristic theology; and you care enough about the theology of wealth and Church hierarchy that you are willing to grit your teeth through 30 hrs of nearly unbearable narration.

Meh

Would you recommend this book to a friend? Why or why not?

Probably not. Pretty dry and LOTS of conjectures.

Has Through the Eye of a Needle turned you off from other books in this genre?

No.

Which character – as performed by Fleet Cooper – was your favorite?

N/A

If this book were a movie would you go see it?

Probably.

Any additional comments?

It was OK. But a bit unfocused and there were a LOT of conjectures and not a lot of internal consistency. EG, he makes a point of saying that, contrary to what we used to believe, a lot of villa's were built up not just to point out that the rich were different/better than the poor, but because the rich actually LIKED their homes (not much of a inference in any event), then moments later says that the villas were like machines whose function was to separate the rich from the poor.

On one hand, this book did give a good feeling for the complexities of trying to capture a long gone culture, on the other hand, fell to the temptation to rather dogmatically make broad generalizations based on scanty evidence.

Still....pretty interesting...

Mispronunciation

Key words and names were mispronounced continuously and in sometimes very creative ways, which was very distracting.

a very good listen..highly recommended for anyone.

I really enjoyed this book and if you are interested in the Early Christian Church and late Roman Empire, you will not be disappointed

The Economics of Roman Christianity

I really enjoyed the approach of this history. It is a history of Rome from the fourth to the sixth century from the perspective of the economics of a changing world in a state of flux caused by the rise of Christianity. The importance of Northern Africa to the Roman world was brought out in a way that I have never understood before. The fact that history is made by the rich and powerful is made profoundly clear in this work. The poor and down-trodden leave no mark save for the manner in which the rich are moved to bring them aid. This is a fine book.

Fleet Cooper gets kudos for his excellent diction. I could always understand what he was reading. Some of his odd pronunciation choices, however, rise to the level of annoyance after a time. He has obviously done some study of different languages and he pronounces foreign words with ease. The problem is that he lets this foreign language training influence the way he pronounces words that are to be spoken in a certain way in English. This is pervasively noticeable for names containing the letter “U.” He insists on giving it the long vowel sound even when the short vowel sound is correct. Towards the end the historical figure Pelagius enters the narrative and I had to suffer through many pronunciations of “Pell-ay-gee-OOS” before he began to say it correctly: “Pell-AY-gee-us.” These oddities of pronunciation were a distraction but did not detract from making this an excellent audio book.