The Devil and His Body

Abstract

This chapter begins to consider Augustine’s perception of the history of Rome and its false gods as the history of the demons themselves, as the most profound works of demons are not individual miracles but the religious institutions of the earthly city. The demons’ fall away from God produces a rival symbolic order to Christ’s angelic ministers, one which manifests in a corporate opposition to Christ’s body. The contrary referents of the work of angels and demons correspond to contrary sacraments, which constitute contrary historical bodies: the body of Christ, which is identified with the church in Augustine’s doctrine of totus Christus, and the body of the devil, the exemplar of which, for Augustine, is pagan Rome. Augustine’s understanding of the earthly city is informed by a concept of disordered, demonic sacraments, and the paradigm for this is his discussion of Hermetic ‘god-making’. In this paradigm, human myths and artefacts manifest a demonic sacramental regime when they are elevated to divine status and given cult, a euhemeristic movement that demons both receive as worship and confirm with wonders.