ABSTRACT
Augustine's religion is based squarely upon the Bible, especially the Psalms, the Gospels and the apostolic letters. The pagans’ spectacles and their gods, as well as their curative and divinatory practices based upon cosmic sympathies or powers inhering in natural objects or in demons, are to be supplanted by a radically opposed attitude toward oneself, life and the world. Augustine's persuasive strategy of Christianization combined a degree of selective accommodation to pagan practices with the substitution of essentially different ones in their place. When Augustine died in 430, the Vandals were besieging his city of Hippo. Caesarius speaks of the hunger and the thirst for the word of God, and about a coming ‘famine’ in this context. Caesarius had designated as ‘the pomps of the Devil’ which were formally renounced at baptism not only adultery, murder, corruption, the watching of bloody spectacles, and divination.
