Spring 2024 · Vol. 53 No. 1 · pp. 107–109
Book Review
Fallen Angels in the Theology of St Augustine
Gregory D. Wiebe. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2021. 258 pages.
Augustine’s cosmos was populated not only by human and nonhuman creatures, but also by angels and demons. This feature of his ancient cosmology—and more importantly, its role in his moral and political thought—has been undertheorized. In this erudite study of the fallen angels in Augustine’s thought, Gregory D. Wiebe provides an excellent, thorough, and theologically nuanced account that fills this lacuna. One may hope that it will contribute to a greater appreciation of the theological complexities of Augustine’s reflections on angels, demons, and the devil, as well as the role they play in his ethics and politics.
Indeed, for Augustine, demons are a serious matter: they seek to rival Christ, and thus to ensnare humans, making false promises that play on human desires in order to secure their worship. By contrast to Christ who is the true mediator that integrates human believers into his redemptive body, demons are “false mediators” that set up a kind of parody of the Christian liturgy—and found the corrupted “earthly city” by contrast to the “city of God.” Given the centrality of mediation and the formation of communities of desire (for good and for ill) in Augustine’s thought, this apocalyptic opposition between Christ and the demons is no peripheral concern.
Since Augustine conceives of demons as fallen angels, Wiebe begins with unfallen angels (chapter 1). They are created on the first day, “enlightened by the Wisdom of God, partakers of eternal light” (23). This angelic participation in divine Wisdom is a key aspect of the role they play in how humans come to know God. Angels are rational intellectual creatures, like humans, but incorporeal (unlike humans). As such, they play a kind of mediating role (anchored Christologically in their contemplation of the Word) in illuminating and articulating the ineffable divine Wisdom.
In chapter 2, Wiebe develops the account of the angelic fall. For Augustine, pride is at the origin of both the angelic and human fall. There are various complexities to account for, however, and Wiebe deftly lays {108} out the various textual and theological knots that Augustine confronts. Ultimately, the version of this angelic fall that emerges most consistently affirms that it is instantaneous and definitive. This is tied to their lack of physical bodies; animal bodies are the condition of human changeability across time, but because angels lack such bodies, their fall is ahistorical. Demonic interventions in human lives certainly are historical, however, and these rely on using created forms (for example, the devil as a snake in the garden of Eden).
Chapter 3 thus turns to demonic bodies. While demons do not have animal bodies, Augustine regularly affirms the idea that they do have “aerial” bodies—these distinguish them from the angels and are a result of their fall. What concerns Augustine primarily, however, is not their ontology, but “their capacity to manipulate corporeal elements and make visions through secret inspirations” (119). This is how they intervene in human affairs, manifesting in a range of ways in their attempts to impress, tempt, and seduce humans. In this sense, demonic phenomena—and their moral and political consequences—are more immediately of concern than detailing their natures as such.
As Wiebe demonstrates in chapter 4, demons do not have “direct” access to human intellects for manipulation. They gain purchase over humans through “false and deceptive appearances” by which they “seduce people to adhere to a lie by associating the lie with apparent goodness, the semblance of truth, even factual correctness” (124). They also play on human curiosity, desires, and capacity to be awed by apparently miraculous phenomena. Humans cannot be deceived, however, without “consenting” to deception. As a result, they are accountable for becoming part of a kind of demonic communion: “But if demons have become gods for the earthly city, it is only because humans have bestowed upon them these honours and have constructed various religious institutions in order to establish them at the centre of their communion” (145). The following two chapters are focused on elaborating how this works and should be of particular interest to scholars working on Augustine’s political theology and ethics.
Chapter 5 discusses the constitution of the “devil’s body” by contrast to Christ’s body. These are two communions established through shared objects of love and mediated by sacraments, but one oriented to love of God and neighbor (and thus redemptive) and the other oriented to self-love and pride (and thus diabolical). These will be characterized not only by certain sacraments, but by the use of signs, which together “comprise its linguistic-symbolic language” (168). Most fundamentally, however, the communion of demons and humans is oriented around idolatry; demons crave signs, symbols, and acts of worship as if they were gods, and when {109} humans participate in these (a form of “god-making”) they become joined to the demonic body.
In chapter 6, Wiebe develops an account of how this demonolatry functions in Augustine’s polemics against pagan religion, philosophy, and politics. As Wiebe notes, demonolatry is significantly bound up with spectacle, which responds to various human desires. Since desire is mimetic, as Wiebe notes, it is not surprising that Augustine’s critique is often directed toward various spectacles (theatre and gladiatorial games or pagan festivals) that have a mimetic potency. These are at the heart of pagan civic life and religion. But Augustine’s demonolatry is also directed toward intellectual justifications of theurgy, and Wiebe details Augustine’s critiques of various thinkers (notably Porphyry) on this front.
Though connections to contemporary matters are made at various points in the book, this is not its dominant focus. Wiebe concludes, however, with implications for contemporary Augustinianism, suggesting that we “have not understood Augustine’s thoughts about the world, its religious cultures, and even its political structures, until we have recognized the demons he thinks operate within them. But perhaps, conversely, we also ought to strive to understand Augustine’s demonology better by attempting to uncover its points of connection with and criticism of the Augustinian engagements with these matters in our own day” (229). This book’s insights should be of great value to future scholarship not only on demonology but more broadly on Augustine’s cultural criticism and his moral and political theology.
