Augustine and the Problem of Power

The Essays and Lectures of Charles Norris Cochrane

Cochrane, Beer

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781498294256
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

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.

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Acknowledgments
• Note on Citations, Editions, and Translations
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Augustine and the Problem of Power
• Chapter 2: The Latin Spirit in Literature
• Chapter 3: The Classical Idea of the Commonwealth
• Chapter 4: Pax Romana
• Chapter 5: Revolution: Caesarism
• Chapter 6: Niccolò Machiavelli
• Chapter 7: The Mind of Edward Gibbon
• Bibliography