By Gary Topping–
“What one book would you want to have with you if you were stranded on a desert island”?
I wince every time I hear that question. It is the most sterile of hypotheticals: I’ve never been on a desert island and have no intention of ever going near one, and the thought of being limited to only one book is to contemplate Hell. There is no single book that would not lethally bore me if it were the only thing I had to read. And yes, my pious friends, that includes the Bible. And yes, my literary snob friends, that includes Shakespeare.
The best answer to that question comes from G. K. Chesterton, who said that he would want a book on shipbuilding. I totally concur.
On the other hand, there are several books that have earned especially high places in my literary pantheon: I can never quite banish Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, for example, from my mind. But the one I want to single out at this time is Charles Norris Cochrane’s Christianity and Classical Culture: A Study of Thought and Action from Augustus to Augustine (1940), which I first encountered in one of Glenn Olsen’s medieval history seminars at the University of Utah and which, its battered cover shows, I have reread it maybe four times over the years.
Although it is a very difficult and sophisticated book, its thesis is quite simple. Classical civilization, the civilization of ancient Greece and Rome, Cochrane argues, was grounded in a faith that mankind could devise a social and political order so perfect that every human need and aspiration could be met and that consequently, history would come to a standstill. In actuality, though, by the time of St. Augustine, that goal remained elusive, and in fact seemed further from realization than ever before. That reality was not lost upon Augustine who, in The City of God and other writings, was merciless in dissecting classical civilization’s failure. What civilization needs, he pointed out, is not a new set of laws, but rather a new human being: one cannot create a perfect social order with imperfect people.
Reading Cochrane is high intellectual excitement, and I’m sure that readers of this blog, who are all high intellectuals, would find it a challenging and rewarding read. What amazes me most about the book is Cochrane’s exhaustive familiarity with his sources and his effortless ability to pull apt quotations and examples from even the most obscure Greek and Latin texts. He will make you want to read much deeper in the classics.
Also, in these days when many of us are dismayed by the political establishment, St. Augustine admonishes us, through Cochrane, that we should never have high expectations from any secular political order (not that we should cease working for a better world and the common good).
Give Cochrane a chance. You could do worse.
