Journeys of The Mind: A Life in History by Peter Brown, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2023, pp. xv+713, £38.00, hbk

Late Antiquity' is so familiar to us as a historical period that it is difficult to imagine how marginal it was when Peter Brown began to study it in the 1950s.The orthodoxy at that time still bowed to Gibbon's 'decline and fall' vision, echoed as recently as E. R. Dodds's influential Pagan and Christian in an Age of Anxiety (1965), in which the third century is described as intellectually impoverished, materially insecure, and filled with fear and hatred.In this wonderful book, Brown relives the gradual but relentless confirmation of his early hunch that this view had to be fundamentally mistaken.With characteristic generosity, he tells us that Dodds himself had taught him more than anyone else that human beings are complex creatures who do not react to their circumstances in such predictable ways; but Brown's hunch was much more the product of his upbringing.Growing up as a Protestant in Dublin, with frequent trips to the Sudan where his father worked, had taught him that religion, despite the negative effects of sectarianism, could hardly be ignored.As he put it in The Making of Late Antiquity (1978): 'The religious historian, just because he is a religious historian, must be "concrete and fastidious." Compared with the flesh and blood that the religious historian demands, much of the conventional and administrative history is an airy wraith'.This was not the best frame of mind with which to confront Oxford in 1952, when Brown won an Exhibition to read Modern History at New College.As taught in Oxford, History was little more than a training ground for future lawyers, civil servants and colonial administrators.'It amounted', writes Brown, 'to the study of power by future wielders of power, largely limited to England alone'.Even the much-praised tutorial system was often harnessed to the need to satisfy examiners, thus reducing the topics of study to those that were sure to 'come up'.As a result, the syllabus was 'at once philistine and Eurocentric', leading to 'a fatal drift towards the lowest common denominator of political and institutional history', often smugly labelled 'grown-up history', in opposition to 'the wider field of the history of religion and ideas'.'Thank God!', exclaims Brown, that 'this was not all that there was to Oxford'.The very beauty of the place had already made him determined to become a mediaevalist, and 'the virtual gravity-free existence of an Oxford undergraduate brought on, at the headlong speed of which only young persons are capable, a series of religious and imaginative earthquakes'.In 1953, Brown attended a meeting of the Socratic Club, where he heard a young Peter Geach mischievously demolish, one by one, the rational proofs for the existence of God.The Club was dedicated to debate between Christians and unbelievers.Its faculty sponsor and president was none other than C. S. Lewis, to whom Brown was so devoted that he considered The Screwtape Letters a