Augustine and the Problem of Power
The Essays and Lectures of Charles Norris Cochrane
- History & Biography
- Publisher: Wipf and Stock
- Published: 2017
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Publisher's Description
More than seventy years after his untimely death, this collection of essays and lectures provides the first appearance of Charles Norris Cochrane's follow-up to his seminal work, Christianity and Classical Culture. Augustine and the Problem of Power provides an accessible entrance into the vast sweep of Cochrane's thought through his topical essays and lectures on Augustine, Roman history and literature, Niccolo Machiavelli, and Edward Gibbon. These shorter writings demonstrate the impressive breadth of Cochrane's mastery of Greek, Roman, and early Christian thought. Here he develops the political implications of Christianity's new concepts of sin and grace that transformed late antiquity, set the stage for the medieval world that followed, and faced the reactions of the Renaissance and Enlightenment. Cochrane analyzes the revival of classical thought that animated Machiavelli's politics as well as Gibbon's historiography. Written amid the chaos and confusion of depression and world war in the twentieth century, Cochrane's writings addressed the roots of problems of his own "distracted age" and are just as relevant today for the distractions of our own age.
Endorsements (3)
“To have available these essays of Charles Norris Cochrane is a belated treasure. Few people understood the relation of culture to politics, religion, and economics better than he. He understood the abiding realities of historical origins as well as the unique place of Augustine in the more general question of the meaning of history.”
“Charles Cochrane’s contribution to scholarship endures because he was willing to go behind the texts to the animating experiences from which they arose. It was in this way that he put us in touch with an ancient world whose problems were not so remote from our own. His guide to those common challenges was the inexhaustible mind of Augustine who taught us to see everything in relation to the mind of God. To have, besides the towering achievement of Christianity and Classical Culture, the companion pieces that David Beer has so expertly edited here, is an occasion for considerable rejoicing. It is a welcome resource for all of us who must continue to reflect on the role of Christianity within the history of order.”
“Although sometimes overshadowed by his Toronto colleagues, including Harold Innis, Frank Underhill, and Donald Creighton, Charles Cochrane was a brilliant classicist whose 1940 book, Christianity and Classical Culture, enriched our understanding of Western history. His sudden death five years later robbed the academic world of an important thinker at the height of his career. Representing years of love and scholarly labor on the part of David Beer, Augustine and the Problem of Power brings that powerful mind to a new generation of readers. We are in Professor Beer’s debt.”
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