Christianity and Classical Culture: A Study of Thought and Action from Augustus to Augustine by Charles Norris Cochrane

Christianity and Classical Culture: A Study of Thought and Action from Augustus to Augustine Reviews

• 
  Douglas Wilson

  Outstanding.
• 
  Shauna

  Informative, if somewhat dry. I always find it amazing that history really does repeat itself. Cicero had the same concerns about his empire that we have about our country today- the fact that there are are too many voices and we are losing our way because of it. He lamented the destabilization of the empire because they let too many influences dilute what it meant to be truly Roman. He was also upset about the welfare state of the empire, believing that allowing so many to languish on assistances for generations the Roman Empire would soon lack a workforce as they would have been brought up to abhor work. Interesting stuff really.
• 
  John

  The Roman empire was founded upon on its own set of pagan values, but as the empire expanded eastward it embraced the Hellenistic values of Greece and cultivated its own form of pagan ideology--Romanitas. This pagan idea centered upon the state as the embodiment of the people in the nation, with the emperor as a divine leader entrusted with the stewardship of guarding civilization against the barbarism on its borders.
  
  Cochrane shows how Romanitas evolved, how it was inherently flawed as it was based upon the Platonic dualism between form and matter. With the growth of Christianity the empire was faced with a theological crisis. Constantine pragmatically embraced the new tide of Christianity as it swept through the empire. He realized the potential in Christianity to provide a bulwark in the empire's defense against the barbarians and the health of the state. He was devout, but more pragmatic than pious. He was sympathetic to the Arians because in them he saw a more "state-friendly" theology.
  
  Julian, a pagan intellectual sought to restore the pagan philosophic foundation of the empire, but failed--essentially because paganism was an inherently flawed system. As the empire grew, its decadence and destructive economic policies were too much to overcome and the end of the empire was nigh as Theodosious frantically sought to save the sinking ship. But his even more heavy-handed tactics could not stop the inevitable collapse of Rome.
  
  Cochrane argues that the "Christian" Roman emperors were seeking to put new wine in old wineskins--seeking to save the empire, even by abandoning its philosophical foundations. Yet they did so not out of selfless desires, but out of the desire to keep the empire together.
  
  The book is a combination of both history, philosophy, and theology. Cochrane weaves a story of a pagan empire, its foundational thought and then shows the clash of religions, its outworking, and how Christianity was both tempted to power and sought independence from state domination.
  
  The book is a difficult read and written for serious scholars--not the amateur historian or philosopher. Those looking for a serious history of this era will not be disappointed. Those of us not prepared for that won't get nearly as much out of it, and will find it difficult reading. An excellent work meant for a different kind of reader than me.
• 
  Coyle

  Update: My outline/notes on this book (by chapter) are available here:
  http://coyleneal.blogspot.com/2014/10...
  
  Ugh, I finally get to categorize this as "read." It's taken me forever to get through, which is partially my fault (laziness) and partially the fault of the good Dr. Cochrane. He is a thoughtful and elegant writer, but lacks structure and doesn't really do much to keep the book moving forward. I mean, granted, it's a philosophy book, but still he really could have given this a once-over and made it a bit more readable.
  Having said that, the content is great and I would highly recommend this for anyone who wants to think carefully about 1) Classical thought; 2) early Christian thought; 3) the relationship between Christianity and the state; 4) the relationship between Christianity and the world.
  Cochrane's point is that there was an inherent tension between Christianity and Classical culture. The Classical world, particularly the Classical world of the Roman Empire, made philosophical and religious claims which ultimately clashed in an unresolvable tension with Christianity. And, well, I don't think I can summarize much more than that. Cochrane's writing style really defines much summarization. Really, the best that can be said is that this is a personal and very well-informed meditation on the relationship between Christianity and Classical culture, and that I am the better for having got to witness it.
  
  
• 
  AC

  Though himself apparently a christian (and sympathetic to Christianity), this is nonetheless an excellent and objective view of classical and christian Humanism. The classic treatment, in fact.
• 
  Jeremy

  Recommended
  here.
  
  See Phil Donnelly's The Lost Seeds of Learning, pp. 12–13 (and n28): Donnelly describes this book as "an alternative interpretation of at least the Augustinian legacy that informed medieval Latin educational institutions" (in contrast to Pearcy's The Grammar of Our Civility).
• 
  Edward Waverley

  This review has been copied from a lecture delivered by RJ Rushdoony:
  
  “Now, this is a very important point. I don’t know how many of you have read Charles Norris Cochrane’s “Christianity in the Classical World. How many of you have? Now, that is sad but I trust you will get it. It is available in paperback. It is the most important book written in the past fifty years. Written by classical scholar, not a Christian, and yet a most eloquent testimony in spite of itself to the Christian faith. Because what Charles Norris Cochrane, in compelling fashion, declares in that book is this, and Dr. VanTil incidentally was one of the earlier readers and was the one who informed me of its significance so that I read it very early; the Greco-Roman world affirmed the freedom of man. No God up there controlling man or predestinating man. So they affirmed a radical freedom on the part of man; his free will. But, says Cochrane, as against the Greco-Roman emphasis on the free will of man and against the early churches emphasis on the predestination of man by God it was the early church who produced the free man. It was the early church and the predestinarian who were the champions of freedom. Why this contradiction?
  
  Well, this was the problem. In the Greco-Roman world view man, as an individual, was surrounded by a vast ocean of change, a brute factuality. This brute factuality overwhelmed man in his solitary freedom here; it crucified him because all the factors in this brute world of factuality being random, overpowering factors bore down on man. The stars determined him, heredity determined him, environment determined him, his parents determined him, his education determined him, his society, his political order, and you name it, determined man. So man with this radical freedom of will in an ocean of brute factuality ended up a hopelessly determined creature.
  
  But, man created in the image of God and predestined by the Sovereign counsel of God as set forth by the church body in terms of victory, moved now in a world which was totally predestined by God in which he himself was totally predestined but in which he had as a creature created in the image of God a secondary freedom, a secondary causality, so that he was not determined. He was God’s free man. So you have the amazing paradox in all the controversy back and forth between the early church fathers and the pagans. The pagans insisting on the free will of man, ending up by concluding man was totally determined and being totally pessimistic, seeing no hope for man, and the Christian affirming God’s predestination and ending up by being the champions of man’s freedom, delivering man, you see, from this world of environment, of heredity, of the stars, of politics and saying, “NO, these things do not determine man.”
  
  As a consequence, he says, intellectually the classical worldview collapsed, it was a failure, and it could not stand up to the arguments and to the witness of the early church so that philosophically the victory went to the church fathers. Let me state again the title of that book because it is eminently worth your while, Charles North Cochrane - Christianity and Classical Culture. It was originally published, and I think almost certainly still is, by the Oxford University Press.”
• 
  Justin Evans

  Very smart, long-range study. I read it primarily to prepare for teaching Augustine, and those chapters were truly excellent. Cochrane's chapters on lesser lights were also solid, as best I could tell.
  
  But I very much, having considered at length the intellectual merits of Cochrane's not to be excelled argument, which deftly intertwines thinking both classical Roman and early Christian, regret that, when considering how such an argument ought to be presented to hoi polloi, the conclusion that of all forms by far and away the best was ultra-Latinate prose, replete with clauses in places distracting and, for English, unnatural, was reached by our author.
  
  It's a fucker of thing to read on the train.
• 
  Phil

  This is a re-read for me from over a decade ago, as I recall. At the time, I had been much struck by its grasp of Classical and patristic themes. I was particularly intrigued by Cochrane's discussion of Romanitas, which is still a highly useful and nuanced discussion even today. After a decade of a fair amount of reading in both patristics and classics, Cochrane still wears well, but I can see a few more of the cracks.
  
  Cochrane's main concern is to track the transition between the classical ethos to a Christian one in the course of the first five hundred years of Christianity. His grasp of the Classical literature is masterful and he continues to produce useful insights with these authors. His discussion of patristic writers tends to be concentrated on the Latin writers, culiminating in Augustine. In fact, St. Augustine in the Christian writer par excellence for Cochrane. Not that I want to disparage Augustine, but it would be interesting to see if the themes that Cochrane pursues would be reflected in, say, the Cappadocians or St. John Chrysothom or later Greek Fathers. Similarity, Jerome doesn't appear very prominently either, which is interesting.
  
  The influence of Gibbon hangs over this book as well as the a flicker of Syme's Roman Revolution. Cochrane writes like a Classicist and has the suitable admiration of the civic ethic of Rome and the standard dislike of monks, religious enthusiasm and such. He is generally sympathetic to Christianity, but his classical loyalties remain strong. None of this is a problem, but it can get distracting.
  
  Cochrane remain a useful book to read on the subject of the Christian attitude to the classical world. There is a little bit of the Western civ approach with this book which tends to set my teeth on edge as a bias goes (it can get rather cozy to be a Anglo-Saxon admirer of the Classics). It is no worse than in sources of the era and, sometimes, our own. Well, worth reading, especially for those inclined to intellectual history, written in a traditional vein.
• 
  Miguel

  parum dumtaxat temporis cunctor utrum hoc veram Geistesgeschichte nuncupare velim: nihil est cunctandum, toto enim caelo illud meretur nomen. nae is totam animi antiqui historiam attingere videtur liber, praesertim in eo quod ad rempublicam, seu ad civitatem pertinent: scriptorem quidem quemque confert, optimum scl eorum qui ab Homero usque ad Augustinum floruere, ejusque sententias colescit ut civilem impetrare possimus notitiam tum "classicam" quae vulgo, tum christianum, haecque omnia valet efficere simul atque illorum temporum res gestas narrans, neque tamen chronistae modo sed quadam spiritali vi ductus, motus adamussim describens animorum, conversionemque ad Christianos cum ipsorum hominum, tum eorum doctrinas. A Cicerone ad Ambrosium, a Sallustio ad Athanasium, a Pindaro ad Julianum imperatorem... reapse beatus habear qui quidem omnino casu hunc mihi sumpsi legique librum, nullum huc inducens consilium aliunde nactus.
• 
  David Eden

  This is a very in-depth read, but worth the effort if you're interested in the classical world and the evolution of western culture to the medieval world and ultimately our own time. First published in 1940, it's still relevant today.
  
  Interestingly, the author's name could be rendered as "Chuck Norris".
• 
  Craig Bolton

  CHRISTIANITY AND CLASSICAL CULTURE by CHARLES NORRIS COCHRANE (2003)
• 
  Ted Newell

  Fabulous account of Christian Europe's foundations. As helpful as Auden is said to have found it, not to mention Lesslie Newbigin.
• 
  Nathan

  Quite a read. It's worth the effort to get to the end of this one. It's another one of those books that makes unbelief look as bad as it is. Very foolish.
• 
  Austin Hoffman

  2020 x2: such a good, yet unrecognized book.
  
  2020: so good. There is a lot to chew on here. Will be revisiting again soon.
  
  Great, but way over my head.
• 
  Jack

  A thoughtful monograph though not especially inspired in parts.