Bibliographic record
Abstract
This thesis seeks to understand the demons found in Augustine's City of God, particularly as they appear as an inseparable component of the political thought he develops in this text more broadly. It has been asserted in contemporary scholarship that the presence of demons in Augustine's writing represents a vestige of his years as a Manichee that undermines the greater political vision he develops in The City of God to the extent that the postulation of demons as such is anti-or apolitical. However, I argue that not only is Augustine's understanding of the nature of demons consistent with his refutation of Manichaeism, but, in fact, Augustine's narration of the origin of demons in the fall of the angels precisely constitutes this refutation. The upshot of this is that, far from being apolitical, Augustine's demons are actually political creatures, and are hence only intelligible when located in his greater political vision. Augustine sees in much of Rome the fellowship of the earthly city in which men and demon alike are bound to one another, captive to the vice that proceeds from their idolatry. I argue that the centrality of demons in Augustine's polemic__Rome cannot be a just commonwealth because it offers worship to demons instead of God__makes a great deal more sense when we appreciate that the worship of God demons occlude is the basis for Augustine's politics. One can only reject Augustine's demons if one has missed the most crucial element of his politics, namely, participation in God through the movement of the Holy Spirit. I conclude by showing Augustine's political demonology to represent the continued development not of a Manichaean sensibility but of a host of biblical traditions regarding the peril of the demonic for God's people.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.022 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".