Gar bear on Nostr: this is some related stuff that I found in the Intro to "City of God" yesterday from ...
this is some related stuff that I found in the Intro to "City of God" yesterday from 300s A.D. The author is kinda giving a resume of what Augustine was writing about:
from G.R Evans' Introduction to "City of God" by Saint Augustine
Augustine needed to take the 'old gods' seriously if he was to win over their adherents. He catches himself up at one point (describing the absurd behaviour of the gods at the time of the birth of Aeneas, a story he and his educated readers would be familiar with from their school- boy reading of Virgil's Aeneid (Civ. 11L3)), and says, 'perhaps I may be thought to be laughing at those fables, and not treating so weighty a matter with proper seriousness'. Augustine has a difficult path to tread when it comes to the account he gives of the relations of human beings with the spirits both he and the pagans believed to be crowding invisibly about them and extremely interested in human doings. The gods exist. They are only too real. It mistaken by the pagans for gods. They are merely 'supposed gods', not in the sense that they do not exist but in the sense that they are full of trickery and deceit (Civ. 17.2). And they particularly wish to deceive human beings so as to tempt them away from the love of God and the fellowship of the true fellow-citizens of the City of God.
Augustine is reassuring that there is nothing to fear from the society of the good spirits, the angels. He calls the angels 'gods' (Civ. 1x.23; LE XL1), which seems to mean no more than that they are supernatural beings. The only matter for regret there is that 'they do not mix with us on the same familiar footing as do men', which is one of the respects in which our sinful condition in this life deprives us of a joy proper to the citizenship we share with them (Civ. x1x.9). Yet Satan is quite capable of pretending to be an angel. The faithful must be on their guard (Cιν. Χ1Χ.9).
Human beings are a distinct creation from the angels. They have bodies as well as souls. In Civ. X11.22 Augustine is anxious to show that the fall of the angels did not cause God to make a change in his pro- jected design for the universe. He suggests that God was following his eternal plan when he 'created man's nature as a kind of mean between angels and beasts', with the intention (a borrowed hermetic idea) that if he obeyed his Creator, man should 'pass over into the fellowship of the angels, but if he did not he should 'live like the beasts, under sentence of death', and 'the slave of his desires', and when he died suffer 'eternal punishment' (Civ. X11.22).
from G.R Evans' Introduction to "City of God" by Saint Augustine
Augustine needed to take the 'old gods' seriously if he was to win over their adherents. He catches himself up at one point (describing the absurd behaviour of the gods at the time of the birth of Aeneas, a story he and his educated readers would be familiar with from their school- boy reading of Virgil's Aeneid (Civ. 11L3)), and says, 'perhaps I may be thought to be laughing at those fables, and not treating so weighty a matter with proper seriousness'. Augustine has a difficult path to tread when it comes to the account he gives of the relations of human beings with the spirits both he and the pagans believed to be crowding invisibly about them and extremely interested in human doings. The gods exist. They are only too real. It mistaken by the pagans for gods. They are merely 'supposed gods', not in the sense that they do not exist but in the sense that they are full of trickery and deceit (Civ. 17.2). And they particularly wish to deceive human beings so as to tempt them away from the love of God and the fellowship of the true fellow-citizens of the City of God.
Augustine is reassuring that there is nothing to fear from the society of the good spirits, the angels. He calls the angels 'gods' (Civ. 1x.23; LE XL1), which seems to mean no more than that they are supernatural beings. The only matter for regret there is that 'they do not mix with us on the same familiar footing as do men', which is one of the respects in which our sinful condition in this life deprives us of a joy proper to the citizenship we share with them (Civ. x1x.9). Yet Satan is quite capable of pretending to be an angel. The faithful must be on their guard (Cιν. Χ1Χ.9).
Human beings are a distinct creation from the angels. They have bodies as well as souls. In Civ. X11.22 Augustine is anxious to show that the fall of the angels did not cause God to make a change in his pro- jected design for the universe. He suggests that God was following his eternal plan when he 'created man's nature as a kind of mean between angels and beasts', with the intention (a borrowed hermetic idea) that if he obeyed his Creator, man should 'pass over into the fellowship of the angels, but if he did not he should 'live like the beasts, under sentence of death', and 'the slave of his desires', and when he died suffer 'eternal punishment' (Civ. X11.22).