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Record W2136439873

The Politics of Possession: Augustine's Demonology in The City of God

2009· dissertation· en· W2136439873 on OpenAlex
David Wiebe

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

fundA Canadian funder is recorded on the work.
no affNo Canadian affiliation: this work is invisible to an affiliation-only frame.
No Canadian affiliation. An affiliation-only frame, the usual design, would never have seen this work. It is one of the works that make the case for inverting the frame.

Bibliographic record

VenueMacSphere (McMaster University) · 2009
Typedissertation
Languageen
FieldArts and Humanities
TopicAugustinian Studies and Theology
Canadian institutionsnot available
FundersMcMaster University
KeywordsDemonologyPossession (linguistics)PoliticsHistoryReligious studiesPolitical scienceArtLiteratureLawPhilosophyLinguistics
DOInot available

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

This thesis seeks to understand the demons found in Augustine's <em>City of God</em>, 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 <em>The City of God </em>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<sup>__</sup>Rome cannot be a just commonwealth because it offers worship to demons instead of God<sup>__</sup>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.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.000
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesInsufficient payload (model declined to judge)
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Theoretical or conceptual · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Other · Consensus signal: Other
Teacher disagreement score0.897
Threshold uncertainty score0.987

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0010.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0140.000

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.

Opus teacher head0.018
GPT teacher head0.218
Teacher spread0.200 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it