Sometimes the growth of belief in the saints has been seen as a superstition of the ignorant or half-converted, a stealthy return of the old gods in saintly disguise: this was a favourite theme of some humanists and Protestant reformers in the sixteenth-century West. In fact it is a logical outcome of the Platonic cast of Augustine’s theology, and an echo of the hierarchies which Plato and his admirers saw as existing in the cosmos around the supreme God. It is no aberration that the majestic literary architecture of The City of God makes space in its final book for a series of accounts of
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