Pagan and Christian in an Age of Anxiety

"Peter Brown and ER Dodds were both Irishmen. Dodds was a precursor to Peter Brown and an iconic figure while Brown was writing. There are some subtle differences between the two. Dodds is particularly interested in individual case studies of figures known through literary texts. He was a superb literary scholar but as he had less of a grasp of the social setting I think he found it harder to place them in the shifting tone of their particular generations. And that is where Brown’s great strength lies. He is very good on the relationship between changes in the outer world and those in representations of the inner person. “Nowadays there is so much emphasis on exercise for the body. Many people go to the gym but pay far too little attention to exercises for the mind.” But Dodds is brilliant in his last chapter, where he develops the work of a French scholar, Pierre de Labriolle, and surveys how much pagans and Christians shared their views of the world. And this is really path-breaking. Yes, very much. The title phrase ‘In an Age of Anxiety’ is borrowed from Dodds’s great friend WH Auden , who had written a poem with that name. Dodds was a man of immense literary sensitivity who writes more beautifully in a more lucid prose than any other academic or historian that I have come across. He was also someone who was in touch with the artists of his own generation. And he was interested in applying psychological, and indeed psychotherapeutic, insights into figures known to us from texts in the past. So there is a subtext which is often slightly Freudian in Dodds’s notes, and some of his analysis is very interesting. Interestingly, I think there is a strong similar streak in my third book, another one by Peter Brown."