Augustine and the Problem of Power, Paperback/Charles Norris Cochrane

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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. "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." -- James V. Schall, SJ, Professor Emeritus, Georgetown University "The devotion of Charles Norris Cochrane's granddaughter, Margaret Phillips, and the hard work of the editor, David Beer, allied to assemble several of Cochrane's shorter works along with material excised by the Oxford University Press from Christianity and Classical Culture. This collection will re-introduce to the world of scholarship one of the most original and comprehensive minds of the early twen