According to a recent AP-NORC poll, nearly 70% of adults in the United States believe in angels, even while significantly fewer (56%) believe in the devil. [1] In light of such polling, perhaps one can say that angels remain “a thing” for at least some twenty-first-century North Americans, just as they were for late ancient Christians. [2] Recent scholarship suggests that angelology and demonology (not to invoke Dan Brown) are certainly and rightly alive and well among historians and theologians. Given his importance to Latin Christian theology and to Western thought more generally, it is no surprise that much of this scholarship has focused on Augustine of Hippo. [3] Gregory D. Wiebe’s Fallen Angels in the Theology of Augustine is a valuable contribution to this growing body of scholarship.
As his title indicates, Wiebe’s focus is on fallen angels, on demons. Others have addressed Augustine’s demonology before, but not in this degree of detail. As the author tells us, the book’s principal goal is a “description of Augustine’s understanding of demons--including the theology, angelology, and anthropology that undergird it” (4). In this, he is successful, and the book ably demonstrates how Augustine’s demonology ultimately involves many other fundamental theological issues such as creation, theodicy, epistemology, human embodiment, ecclesiology, and sacramental theology. Importantly, Wiebe limits his study to Augustine’s treatises (7), most especially The City of God, The Literal Meaning of Genesis, and The Trinity. This means that he does not address Augustine’s sermons, including the rich Enarrationes in Psalmos; but Elizabeth Klein has already covered much of that territory, at least as regards angels, if not demons. [4]
To begin his account of Augustine’s demonology, Wiebe necessarily starts with the nature and role of angels. Angels, as the very name implies, are messengers, “created wisdom,” able (and necessary) to communicate God’s will to human beings. Not only do angels have unique ontological status (as the light created on the first day of creation), they also have unique epistemological status. “They know God directly” (33). Moreover, the angels form the primordial church, praising God from the beginning. They are also “the very image of good government” (51). And, of course, the angels love God, but “the opportunity to love depends upon the freedom of the will to love what it will” (52). With such freedom comes the possibility of disordered desires or misdirected loves.
Chapter two addresses the fall of the angels, the move to the demonic stemming from such disordered desire. In Wiebe’s account, Augustine’s treatment of this pivotal topic raises at least two questions that would continue to stimulate medieval Christian theological speculation (although Wiebe does not discuss this legacy): what was the cause of (not necessarily synonymous with the reason for) the angels’ fall; and when did it occur? As the author notes (53), Augustine’s response to these questions was not always consistent. Here, Wiebe retraces some of Augustine’s well-known thinking about evil, freedom, and the will. His discussion takes an interesting turn as he distinguishes the angelic from the human fall where human embodiment allows for moral transformation unavailable to eternally-damned demons.
This is not to say that demons have no bodies at all. Rather, as Wiebe explores in chapter three, for Augustine, demons “have aerial bodies, differing materially from the ethereal substance of the bodies of unfallen angels” (94). But, here again, Augustine is not consistent; his mature writings “open up room for doubt about the doctrine of angelic bodies” (117). Either way, the point for Augustine, according to Wiebe, is that demons act in history.
How they act is the subject of chapter four (“Demonic Phenomena”). In a rather technical discussion that draws on the work of Eugene TeSelle, Wiebe argues that demonic influence only affects the inferior not the superior operations of the soul, leaving the will intact and free (123). Demons may deceive, afflict, and even possess the soul, but, in accordance with Augustine’s moral philosophy, the soul can only be corrupted by its own will.
According to Wiebe, his chapters five and six “work together as a whole” (148) to present Augustine’s view of Roman paganism as an expression of demonolatry. Chapter five treats Augustine’s famed image of the “two cities” which began among the angels. Here, Wiebe argues that, for Augustine, the two cities correspond to two ecclesial bodies both marked by a “network of signs and activities” (159); that is, by sacraments. Driven by the self-love that defines the earthly city, the demonic body or corpus diaboli engages in the false god-making, the false religion that is paganism.
Chapter six continues the investigation of Augustine’s critique of paganism as itself demonic insomuch as paganism reflects the devil’s own pride and thereby creates an alternate or opposite and fundamentally false community with a fundamentally false symbolic system. In this chapter, Wiebe addresses Augustine’s indebtedness to, and rejection of, Platonic and pagan philosophy, especially as represented by Apuleius and Porphyry. Here, Wiebe offers his most sustained analysis of Augustine’s engagement with “contemporary” thought.
In his conclusion, Wiebe attempts to connect Augustine’s demonology with “present-day concerns.” Part of his discussion involves political ontology and political theology and engages the work of Charles T. Mathewes and Hannah Arendt. Here Wiebe seems attentive to the “inextricably mixed” nature of Augustine’s two cities, even while he emphasizes the salvific role of the church as the body of Christ and “the locus of divine mediation” (229). That is, I think he sees the applicability of Augustine’s critique of demonic idols or “new national gods” (225) as just as relevant to ecclesial bodies and claims (e.g., Christian nationalism) as it is to more explicitly secular, political bodies and claims (e.g., America First).
Overall, this is a well-written, careful, and informative examination of Augustine’s demonology. At the same time, it is also narrowly focused on a single, albeit seminal, author most of whose demonological arguments, as the author acknowledges, “have precedent” (11). As Wiebe himself observes, “much more needs to be explored to identify Augustine’s novel contribution [to demonology] in his Latin milieu, as well as broader Christian writings” (11). Readers of The Medieval Review may be eager for this further exploration to learn more precisely how Augustine’s thinking about the devil and demons resonated (as it surely did) in subsequent centuries.
Two final points: First, Wiebe’s bibliography of secondary sources consists mainly of works in English. It is rich and useful, but it is not comprehensive (nor does it claim to be). Second, throughout his book, Wiebe uses readily available English translations of Augustine’s works, and he has not burdened his text or notes with excessive Latin quotations. This may make the book somewhat more accessible. Although it is not aimed at a popular audience, perhaps at least some of those many US adults who profess belief in angels will read it. They would certainly profit from doing so, as this reviewer did.
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Notes:
2. See Adam Ployd, “Participation and Polemics: Angels from Origen to Augustine,” Harvard Theological Review 110, no. 3 (2017): 421-43, at 438.
3. See, e.g., Ellen Muehlberger, Angels in Late Ancient Christianity (Oxford, 2013); Elizabeth Klein, Augustine’s Theology of Angels (Cambridge, 2018); Corneliu C. Simut, “Angels: Augustine and the Patristic Tradition--The Reality, Ontology, and Morality of Angels in the Church Fathers and Augustine,” The Southern Baptist Journal of Theology 25, no. 2 (2021): 57-74; and Donald Ho-Lun Wong, “The Emergence and Implication of the Role of Angels in Augustine’s Understanding of Creation: The Extension and Mirroring of Christ,” Religions 14, 322 (2023), https://doi.org/10.3390/rel14030322.
4. See Klein, Augustine’s Theology, 148-86.