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.
