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.
Augustine proceeds to a rigorous logical analysis of Apuleius’s definition of demons. Apuleius defines them as animals, rational, subject to passion, aerial in body, and eternal in duration. Augustine dissects this definition to show the miserable condition of these beings. He notes that Apuleius describes men as mortal and miserable, and gods as immortal and blessed. Demons, according to the definition, share the passions of men and the immortality of body (though not soul) of the gods. Augustine argues that this combination results in a state of “eternal misery” or “miserable eternity.” He points out that the soul is the superior part of a living creature, and the body the inferior. Yet these mediators are linked to the gods by their inferior part (the body) and to men by their superior part (the soul). They are, as it were, suspended head downwards, united to the celestial gods by the servant and bound to miserable men by the ruler. This is not a harmonious mediation but a grotesque inversion. Augustine cites Plotinus, who said that the Father showed mercy to men by making their bonds—that is, their bodies—mortal, so that death might free them from trouble. Demons, however, have been judged unworthy of this mercy; they are eternally bound to their bodies, making them more wretched than men, who at least have the hope of release through death.
Augustine then addresses the Platonist claim that human souls become demons after death. He dismisses this as a whirlpool sucking men to moral destruction, as it might encourage wicked men to hope for divine honors as hurtful spirits after death. Returning to the logical structure of the Platonist theology, Augustine examines the three qualities that distinguish the extremes: gods have exaltation, eternity, and blessedness; men have lowliness, mortality, and misery. For demons to be truly intermediate, they must hold a middle position in these qualities. They possess an aerial body, which is a middle place between the ethereal and terrestrial. However, regarding the other qualities, they must either be blessed or miserable, mortal or immortal. Since Apuleius asserts they are eternal, they cannot receive mortality from men. Therefore, to maintain a middle position, they must receive misery from men. Thus, the Platonist definition logically compels the conclusion that demons are immortal and miserable. They are not “eudemons” (good demons), for if they were good and eternal, they would be blessed and thus indistinguishable from the gods in the most essential respects, losing their intermediate character. A true mediator between blessed immortals and miserable mortals would need to be either mortal and blessed, or immortal and miserable. The demons are the latter, and therefore cannot lead men to blessedness.
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