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.
Conceived ambitiously, executed with grace and perfect erudition, this book has become one of the most acclaimed studies of the transition from aspirations of the classical world to those of late antique Christendom. Cochrane was first of all a classical scholar, so this work may be considered on one plane an interpretive history of Rome from the end of the Republic to the fall of the Empire. His summations of the thought and significance of Aristotle, Cicero, Vergil, Livy, Seneca, Tacitus, Lactantius and especially Augustine might well be regarded classics in themselves. But he was dissatisfied with the lack of integration between classical and early Christian studies and sought to remedy this by bringing the historical influence of Christian thought to bear on the final stages of his subject. Though deeply appreciative of Gibbon, Cochrane was more judicious regarding such influence and attributed (as his colleague Martin Tait put it) ''the political and social failure of the Graeco-Roman civilization of the Roman Empire to a defect in the logic of classical naturalism, which failed to reconcile the concepts of order and process,'' a defect corrected in the Trinitarian theology of St. Augustine and the beginnings of a philosophy of history. The claims of Rome to be ''the Eternal City,'' professing to satisfy the essential requirements of human nature and in the end addressing its emperors as ''Lord and God,'' were rendered penultimate, bracketed by the eternity of the City of God, the proper object of all human loyalty and longing. Wrote W.H. Auden: ''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.'' It is now republished in a pleasing new edition with a larger typeface and fine paper, and with Cochrane's Latin citations rendered into English in an appendix. 624 pp.
Conceived ambitiously, executed with grace and perfect erudition, this book has become one of the most acclaimed studies of the transition from aspirations of the classical world to those of late antique Christendom. Cochrane was first of all a classical scholar, so this work may be considered on one plane an interpretive history of Rome from the end of the Republic to the fall of the Empire. His summations of the thought and significance of Aristotle, Cicero, Vergil, Livy, Seneca, Tacitus, Lactantius and especially Augustine might well be regarded classics in themselves. But he was dissatisfied with the lack of integration between classical and early Christian studies and sought to remedy this by bringing the historical influence of Christian thought to bear on the final stages of his subject. Though deeply appreciative of Gibbon, Cochrane was more judicious regarding such influence and attributed (as his colleague Martin Tait put it) ''the political and social failure of the Graeco-Roman civilization of the Roman Empire to a defect in the logic of classical naturalism, which failed to reconcile the concepts of order and process,'' a defect corrected in the Trinitarian theology of St. Augustine and the beginnings of a philosophy of history. The claims of Rome to be ''the Eternal City,'' professing to satisfy the essential requirements of human nature and in the end addressing its emperors as ''Lord and God,'' were rendered penultimate, bracketed by the eternity of the City of God, the proper object of all human loyalty and longing. Wrote W.H. Auden: ''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.'' It is now republished in a pleasing new edition with a larger typeface and fine paper, and with Cochrane's Latin citations rendered into English in an appendix. 624 pp.
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