Augustine and the Problem of Power

About the Book

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.

Contents and Themes

Augustine and the Problem of Power offers 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.

Historical and Political Insights

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.

Relevance and Reflection

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.