“That all superstition of pagans and heathens should be annihilated is what God wants, God commands, God proclaims!”
— Saint Augustine
Notes: The story of Christianity's rise in Ancient Rome is often told in secular terms: weakened emperors, barbarian invasions, heavy taxation, plagues, and a weary populace. Religion, when mentioned, is seen as a psychological comfort in an age marked by disease, war, famine, and death. Conventional narratives argue that in such times, people sought reassurance and were drawn to Christianity, which promised hope in this life or the next.
However, this was more than a sociopolitical shift; it was viewed as a spiritual war between good and evil, God and Satan. Modern historians may overlook these demonologies, but they deeply influenced early Christian thinkers like Augustine. Demons stalk the pages of his book, “The City of God” of which it’s full forgotten title was "The City of God Against the Pagans.”
Christianity may have been adopted by the Roman ruling class to centralise power and control the populace by creating a docile and slave like population. With Rome's increasing diversity, a universalist religion, rather than prior ethnic religions, was more suitable for the rulers to impose. Passages like “Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and to God the things that are God’s” (Matthew 22:21) and “Let everyone be subject to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established” (Romans 13:1) encouraged obedience and tax compliance.
The Roman rulers, taken in by the Trojan horse of Christianity, likely had no conception of its true long-term purpose: to act as prophecy fulfilment of the Old Testament, destroying the ancestral and indigenous tradition and worship of the Old Gods, bringing the gentiles under the yoke of the God of Israel. Christianity constituted a form of theological and spiritual warfare, as those who injected this archontic plague into populations understood the Hermetic maxim of ‘As Above, So Below’. Thus, if the gentiles were conquered in the heavens by the destruction of their native Gods (as above), they could thereby be more easily conquered on earth (so below).
