The City of God stands as Augustine's masterwork of theological defense and construction, written over thirteen years in response to accusations that Christianity brought ruin upon Rome. This first volume contains the first ten books of sustained refutation—demolishing pagan claims that traditional worship secured either temporal prosperity or eternal happiness—followed by the beginning of his positive vision in Books Eleven through Thirteen, where he traces the origin of two societal orders to the primordial division among the angels. What emerges is not merely an apology for Christianity but a philosophy of history that subordinate the fate of empires to the hidden providence of the one true God, whose sovereignty extends from creation through the fall to the final judgment.
To address this, Augustine turns to the threefold division of rational souls proposed by these philosophers: a division into gods, men, and demons. According to this view, the gods occupy the highest region of heaven, men the lowest region of earth, and demons the middle region of the air. The dignity of their natures corresponds to the dignity of their regions; thus, the gods are better than men and demons, while demons, holding the middle place, are inferior to the gods but superior to men. This superiority is attributed to the demons sharing the immortality of body with the gods, while sharing the passions of the mind with men. Augustine observes that this classification is used to explain why demons are delighted with the obscenities of the theatre and the fictions of poets—because they are subject to human passions from which the gods are far removed. Consequently, Augustine argues that it was not the good gods whom Plato deprived of theatrical pleasure by expelling the poets, but rather the demons, who are the ones actually delighted by such things.
Augustine cites Apuleius, the Platonist of Madaura, who wrote a work entitled Concerning the God of Socrates. Apuleius asserts that the familiar spirit attending Socrates was not a god but a demon, and he diligently discusses the middle estate of demons compared to the lofty estate of gods and the lowly estate of men. Augustine presses the implications of this: if Socrates’ familiar was a demon, and Plato banned the poets from the state, then Plato’s intention was to admonish the human soul to despise the shameful commands of the demons and detest their impurity rather than to deprive good gods of their legitimate pleasures. If Plato was virtuous in prohibiting these things, then the demons were shameful in commanding them. Augustine suggests that either Apuleius is wrong about the nature of Socrates’ familiar, or Plato held contradictory opinions, or Socrates is not to be congratulated on such a friendship. He notes that Apuleius himself seemed aware of the horror attached to the name of demons, as he titled his book On the God of Socrates rather than On the Demon of Socrates, likely to avoid the stigma that would repel readers. Ultimately, Augustine concludes that the only things Apuleius could find to praise in demons were subtlety, strength of body, and a higher place of habitation, while their manners were described as entirely bad.
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