In his study of the late Roman world, Peter Brown offers an image that challenges our modern, sterile view of economics. He writes:
“Wealth was a theme that lay heavy on everybody’s mind. The issue of wealth flowed like a great braided river through the churches and through Roman society as a whole. Wealth was not only about budgets and rent books: the streams of that great and diverse river touched on many banks.”
In our current “Secular Imaginary,” we often treat wealth as a series of isolated metrics—interest rates, GDP, or personal net worth. It stays in the “ledger.” But for the late Roman Christian, wealth was a braided river. It was inseparable from:
The Bank of Salvation: How one’s coins affected one’s standing before God.
The Bank of Patronage: The ancient networks of loyalty and dependence that held society together.
The Bank of Mercy: The radical claim that the surplus of the rich was the property of the poor.
When we look at the 8th-century “Managerial Turn,” we are seeing what happens when an institution tries to build a dam and a canal system for that river. The Church didn’t just manage budgets; it managed the “many banks” where wealth touched the human soul.
As we move toward our next deep dive on April 14th, keep this “braided river” in mind. The tragedy of the modern wealth gap may not be that we have too much or too little money, but that we have forgotten how to see the river as anything other than a budget.