Prof Peter Brown Renehan Hall

THE ANNUAL MONSIGNOR PATRICK J. CORISH LECTURE, 2014
"Monks, Labour and the “Holy Poor”:
Early Christian Monasticism between Egypt and Syria"
Prof. Peter Brown
Philip and Beulah Rollins Professor of History, Emeritus
Princeton University
Renehan Hall, St Patrick’s College, Maynooth, County Kildare.
Tuesday 7 October 2014
7.30pm
The Annual Corish Lecture is held in honour of Monsignor Patrick J. Corish (1921-2013), former Professor of Ecclesiastical History and, later, President, Maynooth College.
This lecture was subsequently published as a journal article in Irish Theological Quarterly, 81: 3 (August 2016). See here: journals.sagepub.com/toc/itqa...

[@zihangchen4086]

inventor of the discipline of Late Antiquity. Aspiring historian.

[@TheresaMadame]

Inspiring, I think. And he didn't invent the discipline. He discovered the vitality of the period, and presented transformative scholarship so winsomely as to invite more scholarship. He hauled five hundred absorbing years out of the abyss, and gave birth to a whole universe of ethically informed historiography.

[@mwdarc]

Work to eat but existence is suffering the point of the monk is non existence or oneness with God. Heaven is the goal and death not to be shunned. "Consider the lilies, how they grow: they neither toil nor spin; and yet I say to you, even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these." The point of giving all to the poor was so one could be poor for it is "And again I say to you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.” To work for you life is to be attached to your ego. The justification for the wealth of the church has always been the giving to the poor.

[@johnmeyer3366]

Lose greed, narcissism, and jealousy to relieve the suffering of the people. Read about the "real poor" and spreaders of light in the distant past.

[@splinterbyrd]

Why does Late Antiquity attract so many historians who are gay men?