Posted By BillHeise on June 12, 2009

This is an article associated with the article “15 Memorable Books.” See the article for an explanation of this article.
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I used to keep a list of my five favorite books, and the first of those five was Charles Norris Cochrane’s Christianity and Classical Culture. It is to this book that I constantly went back when I had doubts about myself in graduate school.

I first encountered this book during my third and last semester at Ripon College, where was assigned to me as the guide through a History of Western Philosophy class. I stopped going to class before we got to later classical philosophy and its perpetuation through the Middle Ages, and I never read the book. It was three years later, after I had managed to bulk up my vocabulary to a sufficient level, that I could pick up Cochrane’s book. And even then I didn’t manage to get all of the message out of it .

At this point my life I was exercising my mind by reading the Encyclopaedia Britannica (see entry #4) and having “knowledge contests” with my friend Eduard Vidmar, who had left the doctoral program in philosophy to start his own bookstore, Project 1999. [He had to change his bookstore name after 1999 had come and gone, but I can't remember what he called it]. I would sit and read Grun’s Timetables of History and memorize the dates. I was particularly interested in dates of early history, Roman and medieval dates, since they seem to have so many stories attached to them.

[At the time, my roommate Charles would ask me questions like “what happened in 819?” And I would actually have an answer, to which Charles would shake his head half in astonishment that anybody would ever want to know so much about history and half in sheer ridicule. I didn’t care. I repeated this feat at Northern Illinois University, where my audience was equally mystified as to why I knew so much history and why on earth that I cared.]

The fact of the matter was that you needed to have a certain amount of history available to you to read Cochrane. He would talk about things like “the Sullan terror” (4) and Cato of Utica (8) without so much as an introduction. He was interested in tracing his interpretation of Roman history, not in giving me a history itself. That put me at a disadvantage until I knew what Cochrane was talking about. So I studied and I learned.

The fact was that I was feeling like I was falling farther and farther behind my peers, would had gone to college and were now graduating, while I was just catching up to them, learning the basic vocabulary needed to read a page in Time magazine.

I ended up surpassing them and getting into the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana, a school I could not have ever dreamed about getting into right out of high school. And when I did, my experience reading Cochrane’s book shaped my worldview much more than the “standard” worldview that obtained in graduate school, where in particular they had a much different approach to the Middle Ages.

On this website, say that Cochrane was

haunted by the insight that in the absence of a principle of “creative integration,” Western civilization was doomed to oscillate between idealism (animal faith) and naturalism (the detritus of skepticism). Cochrane’s principal book, Christianity and Classical Culture (1940), is a study of the emergence of Christian metaphysics from the ruins of (Roman) civilization. It argued that Augustine provided a coherent philosophy of civilization, overcoming the fatal deficiency of the classical experience: its absence of a principle of “creative integration.”

That sounded about right to me (still does), but it was at odds with the view of the Middle Ages as an age of darkness kept open only by the valiant efforts of a few great thinkers who kept the flame of learning alive.

When I wrote my dissertation I cited Cochrane in a footnote and said that it was my favorite book. One of my medieval professors said he was familiar with the book, and even that he had had it in on his reading list, but he had breezed through it and had never really understood it. It was at the center of my experience; it was at the periphery of others’ experience. This made it an important book in my life; but one which, on account of its contrary perspective on the Middle Ages, was a source of discord between me and my fellow academic colleagues.

I continued to read Cochrane’s work even after I had finished my dissertation. And when I read it for the seventh or eighth time I was still discovering new meanings in it. One of those meanings was the missing key to my dissertation [see #13 The Works of Augustine]. However, I had not managed to pick it up in time. My dissertation, therefore, with was incomplete. I had decided, having had such an uphill battle through graduate school, that I would not pursue a professional academic career. My dissertation was laid aside, I thought, forever.

I have owned four copies of Cochrane’s book. The first lasted longest, but eventually the cover fell off and several of the first pages. I kept it because I had made many notes in the margins. The second book was delivered to me with a broken spine, and so I decided to order a third hardback copy. It turned out to be mislabeled, and it, too, was a paperback. So I finally ordered a fourth copy and verified that it was indeed a hard back copy. It has lasted until now.

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