Charles Norris Cochrane – författare

The theme of 'Christianity and Classical Culture' is the fundamental change in thought and action that occurred from the reign of Augustus to the time of Augustine. The classical world sought to practice politics and understand the world in purely rational terms, but the difficulties of this program were already evident as Christianity began developing a completely new understanding of the human world. It is from this revolution in ideas that our modern world was forged. W H Auden wrote of an earlier edition in The New Republic: Since the appearance of the first edition in 1940, I have read this book many times, and my conviction of its importance to the understanding not only of the epoch with which it is concerned, but also of our own, has increased with each rereading.

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.