Smashing the Kingdom of Jove

Post last updated on October 1, 2025

 Image credit:  rah

In his book Christianity and Classical Culture, Charles Norris Cochrane spends a considerable number of pages to summarize Augustine’s efforts to undermine the false assumptions of the classical world. Below are three brief quotations. First, Cochrane writes:

Augustine thus discovers the Trinity a fresh foundation for what we have called the value of personality. And here the breach with Classicism was radical; what it involved was nothing less than a question of first principles. But, in this connection, it should be noted that Augustine’s revolt was not from nature; it was from the picture of nature proposed by classical science; i.e. from a cosmology and an anthropology constructed in terms of form and matter as the basis for a “formal” ethic and a “formal” logic. This was to smash the kingdom of Jove and to unbind Prometheus, who was thus revealed as the victim of nothing but his own obsessions, the obsessions of the “scientific” understanding. It was also to dispute the nightmare involved in the concept of nature as a closed system, determined by its own exclusive laws and, therewith, of the antithesis between human liberty and natural necessity which rendered mankind a stranger in his own household.¹Charles Norris Cochrane, Christianity and Classical Culture: A Study of Thought and Action from Augustus to Augustine (Carmel, Indiana: Liberty Fund, 2003; repr., 1944), 453-455.

Cochrane later writes that, according to Augustine,

the error of Classicism may be summarily described as a failure to identify the true source of power and, therewith, its true character and conditions. The error thus indicates its original, and to it may be ascribed the whole tissue of fallacies which frustrate the secular aspirations of men. These fallacies Christianity explodes in a sentence: all power cometh from on high. In so doing, it does not subscribe to the antithesis which sets ‘power’ in opposition to ‘benevolence’ after the manner of those flabby sentimentalists whom Aristotle so sharply criticizes in a famous chapter of the Politics. Nor is it condemned to labor with Aristotle himself in a vain endeavor to effect a partial reconciliation between the two. For it perceives that, however vicious in principle, the secular desire of man to apprehend and possess himself of power is but the perversion of a wholly natural and proper impulse to save himself from danger and destruction; and that it may be explained as a consequence of his inability to recognize his own highest and greatest good. Accordingly, for the Christians, the antithesis is not between ‘benevolence’ and ‘power’; it is rather between the love of power and the power of love. From this standpoint the pax caelestis, the order of the divine society, constitutes at the same time the order of love. This may well be mysterious, but it is not mythical or hypothetical. For it means simply that the self-same human wills have attached themselves, not to transcendental objects (that they leave to Platonism) but to a principle which gives to the ‘object’ world a wholly fresh complexion, thus ‘making all things new.” That is to say, what it prescribes is adhaerere Deo, adhesion to God, the source of truth, beauty, and goodness, the supreme reality, as the one fundamental principle for individual regeneration and social reformation, the point of departure for a fresh experiment in human relationships, on the acceptance of which rests the only real hope of fulling the promise of secular life. This is the Christian alternative to the pagan proposition that correct action presupposes correct thinking; and it may be accurately described as “justification by faith.”²Cochrane, 552-553.

And then,

The criticism of classical truth is, at the same time, a criticism of classical ethics. To Classicism morality is a matter either of emotion or of reason. The former it regards as subjective, particularist, barbarian; the other as objective, universal, the morality of civilized man. Christian sapientia,³Editor’s note: By sapientia he refers to Christian insight and wisdom. See p. 555. however, cuts across these heresies of the scientific intelligence in order to base the moral judgement on bona voluntas, thereby giving to it a validity to which no system of formal ethics can properly lay claim. For the judgement of bona voluntas is a judgment neither of blind instinctive emotion on the one hand nor, on the other, of calculated individual or social utility. It is a judgment of the man as a whole. Accordingly, it discards the ideas whether of barbarism (thinking with the blood) or of civilization (classical ataraxia, apatheia) to insist that ‘the passions are to be so governed and held in leash that they may be turned to the service of justice.’ The question for us, declares Augustine, ‘is not if the mind is angry but why it is angry; not if it is sad, but why is it sad; not if it is afraid, but why it is afraid.’⁴Cochrane’s note: The City of God, ix.
4 and 5. In this fresh attitude Augustine discovers the basis, not of a formal but of a substantial ethic; the sum-total of which is comprehended by the law of love (lex caritatis).⁵Cochrane, 559-560.