- Augustus, by uniting virtue and fortune in himself (viii, 174), established “the final triumph of creative politics,” solving “the problem of the classical commonwealth” (32).
- For a Christian with Tertullian’s view of things, the “deification of imperial virtue” that accompanied this “triumph” was sheer idolatry: Therefore Regnum Caesaris, Regnum Diaboli (124, 234).
- “The crisis of the third century … marked … an eclipse of the strictly classical ideal of virtue or excellence” (166), and left people wondering what to do if the Augustan solution were not a solution after all. What if there is “no intelligible relationship” between virtue and fortune (171)?
- Christians had remained largely detached during the crisis of the third century, neither wanting Rome to collapse nor prone to being surprised if it did, since its eventual fall was inevitable anyway (195).
- Then Constantine came along and “both professed and practiced a religion of success” (235), according to which Christianity was a “talisman” that ensured the renewal of Romanitas (236).
- After some time and several reversals (most notably in the reign of Julian the Apostate) and occasional recoveries (for instance in the reign of Theodosius) it became clear that both the Constantinian project and the larger, encompassing project of Romanitas had failed (391).
- Obviously this was in many ways a disaster, but there was some compensation: the profound impetus these vast cultural crises gave to Christian thought, whose best representatives (above all Augustine) understood that neither the simple denunciations of the social world of Tertullian nor Constantine’s easy blending of divergent projects were politically, philosophically, or theologically adequate.
- Thus the great edifice of the City of God, Cochrane’s treatment of which concludes with a detailed analysis of the philosophy of history that emerges from Augustine’s new account of human personality: see 502, 502, 536, 542, 567-69.
Just in case it’s useful to someone. Those page numbers are from the Liberty Fund edition, which I ended up using for reasons I’ll discuss in another post.
Text Patterns
June 6, 2016
I've tried to finish this book several times, but other priorities keep coming up. This is very helpful. Thank you for posting it.