Fallen angels in the theology of Saint Augustine

Author / Creator

Wiebe, Gregory D., author

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Summary

This book ventures to describe Augustine of Hippo's understanding of demons, including the theology, and anthropology that contextualize it. Demons are, for Augustine as for the Psalmist (95:5 LXX)...

This book ventures to describe Augustine of Hippo's understanding of demons, including the theology, and anthropology that contextualize it. Demons are, for Augustine as for the Psalmist (95:5 LXX) and the Apostle (1 Cor. 10:20), the 'gods of the nations'. This means that Augustine's demons are best understoodneither when they are 'spiritualized' as personifications of psychological struggles nor in terms of materialist contagions that undergird, a superstituious moralism. Rather, because the gods of the nations are the paradigm of demonic power and influence over humanity, Augustine sees the Christian's moral struggle against them within broader questions of social bonds, cultural form, popular opinion, philosophical investigation, liturgical movement, and so fourth. In a word, Augustine's demons have a religious significance, particularly in the Augustinian sense of bonds and duties between persons, and between persons and that which is divine. Demons are a highly integrated component of his broader theology, rooted in his conception of angels as the ministers of all creation under God, and informed by the doctrine of evil as privation and his understanding of the all, his thoughts on human embodiment, desire, vision, and the limits of human knwledge, as well as his theology of religious incorporation and sacraments. As false mediators , demons are mediated by false religin, the body of the devil, which Augustine opposes with an appeal to the true medator, Christ, and the true religion of his body, the church --

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