Question regarding the original Latin of Augustine's City of God.

[Rion]

In Book VIII, Chapter 24, Augustine quotes Hermes the Egyptian as saying the following in regards to idols:

"they also brought in a power derived from the nature of the universe as a supplement to this technique, suitable for their purpose, and by this addition (since they could not create souls) they called up the souls of angels or demons and made them inhere in sacred images and in divine mysteries, so that by their means the idols could have the power of doing good or inflicting harm"

Since it is an Egyptian he is quoting, I was wondering what the term/phrase he uses for "power derived from the nature of the universe"? Is it a reference to the Egyptian concept of ma'at?

 

[Quid est Veritas?]

The Latin uses 'de mundi natura'. This refers to the hellenistic idea of Logos, of a divine principle underlying the universe as seen in Stoicism or Neoplatonic ideas like the One.
To Augustine this underlies the idea of God, Christ being the Logos.
If the chapter is read in context, it is about creating gods; constructing idols. He is saying they build statues then imbue them with the principles of nature, the underlying powers of Nature - they make gods of love, growth, the sun etc. or more amorphous virtues like Justice, Prudence, Felicity etc.
Essentially Augustine argues that they are taking aspects of God and deifying them by reference to demons or angels that are made to embody or corrupt these aspects. They are perverting the goodness of God.

By Augustine's time, traditional Egyptian religion was largely extinct. It clung on in a few isolated areas, but no longer existed as such and certainly not in anything but a folk religion sense.
The only exception was the prevalent hellenistic cult of Isis and Sarapis, which was a grecified form of Osiris worship. This however was largely shorn of Egyptian theology by this stage and had a clear neoplatonic or mystery religion bent, not unlike Orphism. It is similar to Mithraism in that it used foreign iconography and names but its theological contents were very much Greco-Roman.
Augustine in Roman Africa likely had no contact at all with the idea of Ma'at, nor was this a general idea in his time at all.
If we look at Augustine's personal history then a derivation of this concept from Manichaeism is more likely, but this is an unnecessary reach seeing that the chapter can be perfectly understood from standard hellenistic conceptualisations of the Logos and Nature.

 

[Quid est Veritas?]

Here is the original Latin:

Cui inuentae adiunxerunt uirtutem de mundi natura conuenientem, eamque miscentes, quoniam animas facere non poterant, euocantes animas daemonum uel angelorum eas indiderunt imaginibus sanctis diuinisque mysteriis, per quas idola et bene faciendi et male uires habere potuissent.