Book contents
- Frontmatter
- CONTENTS
- Dedication
- Acknowledgements
- List of Illustrations
- Introduction
- 1 Cities of God Besieged
- 2 The Possession of María Pizarro
- 3 The Devils of Trujillo and the Passion of the Poor Clares
- 4 The Sally: Christianity Beyond the Walls
- 5 Satan's Fortress: The Devil in the Andes
- 6 The Breach: Devils of the In-Between
- Conclusion
- Notes
- Glossary
- Works Cited
- Index
1 - Cities of God Besieged
- Frontmatter
- CONTENTS
- Dedication
- Acknowledgements
- List of Illustrations
- Introduction
- 1 Cities of God Besieged
- 2 The Possession of María Pizarro
- 3 The Devils of Trujillo and the Passion of the Poor Clares
- 4 The Sally: Christianity Beyond the Walls
- 5 Satan's Fortress: The Devil in the Andes
- 6 The Breach: Devils of the In-Between
- Conclusion
- Notes
- Glossary
- Works Cited
- Index
Summary
I classify the human race into two branches: the one consists of those who live by human standards, the other of those who live according to God's will. I also call these two classes the two cities, speaking allegorically. By two cities I mean two societies of human beings, one of which is predestined to reign with God for all eternity, the other doomed to undergo eternal punishment with the Devil […] this is their final destiny.
The Two Standards and the Geometry of God
The two cities, the civitas Dei and civitas terrena of Augustine's seminal work, The City of God, had a profound effect upon the self-perception and development of the Hispano-Christian world. Augustine's work is rhetorical, allegorical and constructed upon the aesthetic principle of the harmonization of opposites. His descriptions, as he writes, were not meant to be understood physically but rather in spiritual or mystical terms, and yet over the centuries his invocation of a godly society diametrically opposed to the earthly city of the damned exerted a radical influence on Christian perceptions of the physical world. Even if the majority of sixteenth-century Spaniards in the Americas were not wholly conversant with the specific writings of this Doctor of the Church, Augustine's influence imbued Hispanic society with a particularly urbanized vision of the civilized world.
Augustine wrote the City of God in the context of an empire profoundly affected by Alaric's sack of Rome in ad 410. The Roman response, not unpredictably, was to give greater impetus to the strategy of walling cities to protect the citizens and Roman civilization within. In addition, Christian bishops had by that time begun to take on an increasingly important role in temporal administrative functions. As David Nicholas writes, they moved ‘into the power vacuum left by the declining municipal senates and provincial governors’. Nicholas adds that ‘in 409 the emperor Honorius ordered that the bishop, the clergy and local landowners not of curial rank should join the decurions in choosing the defender of the city’.
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- Diabolism in Colonial Peru, 1560–1750 , pp. 13 - 36Publisher: Pickering & ChattoFirst published in: 2014