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The main concern of this book is with those aspects of Augustine's thought which help to answer questions about the purpose of human society.
How the notion of unique eras influenced the Roman view of time and the narration of history from various perspectives. The Victorian Era. The Age of Enlightenment. The post-9/11 years. We are accustomed to demarcating history, fencing off one period from the next. But societies have not always operated in this way. Paul Hay returns to Rome in the first century BCE to glimpse the beginnings of periodization as it is still commonly practiced, exploring how the ancient Romans developed a novel sense of time and used it to construct their views of the past and of the possibilities of the future. It was the Roman general Sulla who first sought to portray himself as the inaugurator of a new age of prosperity, and through him Romans adopted the Etruscan term saeculum to refer to a unique era of history. Romans went on to deepen their investment in periodization by linking notions of time to moments of catastrophe, allowing them to conceptualize their own epoch and its conclusion, as in the literature of Vergil and Horace. Periodization further introduced the idea of specific agents of change into Roman thought—agents that were foundational to narratives of progress and decline. An eye-opening account, Saeculum describes nothing less than an intellectual and cognitive revolution, that fundamentally reorganized the meanings of history and time.
Augustine’s Apocalyptic Political Theology in the Evil Saeculum investigates Augustine’s apocalyptic political theology under the premise that he perceived the saeculum, or this age, as evil. Augustine views the saeculum as wicked because of the activity of the devil and demons. For Augustine, the devil perverted our social life and politics by mediating the false collective memory of the created world, social life, and politics through media, such as various religio-cultural liturgies and literary works. In particular, the demons reinforced Roman citizens’ amor sui, amor laudis, and libido dominandi by employing pagan rituals and literature that mediated the collective memory of the imperial period, justifying the existence and expansion of the empire. As such, this book explores the socio-political implications of Augustine’s demonology.