Justified True Belief

(●) The emperor’s own professor of Latin, who lost his chair when the persecution began and spent the next ten years writing the first complete case for Christianity in the Latin language. + Before Lactantius, a Christian who wanted to answer the charges against his faith in Latin had two or three short books to reach for, and all of them were replies. Tertullian had written an Apology, which in the old sense means a speech for the defence rather than an expression of regret. Cyprian had written an angry open letter to a man named Demetrianus. Minucius Felix had written a dialogue set on the beach at Ostia, the port town at the mouth of the Tiber where Romans went to get out of the city. They are fine books and they all do the same job: somebody has accused us of something, and here is why the accusation is false. Lactantius thought that job was only half of the work, and he said so in print. Refuting an accuser leaves a reader knowing what Christians do not believe. It does not leave him knowing what they do believe, or why, or in what order the pieces fit together. So he set out to write the other half: a course of instruction that started with a pagan reader who thought the Scriptures were fairy stories, took him through the false gods, the origin of evil, the failure of the philosophers, the identity of Christ, the nature of justice, the duties of a worshipper and the end of the world, and put the whole thing in Latin good enough that a man trained in Cicero would not wince. Seven books, finished while he was out of a job and, according to Jerome, often short of food. He called them the Divine Institutes, borrowing the word Roman lawyers used for a beginner’s textbook. There is one fact about him that tends to stay with people who hear it. Eleven and a half centuries later, when two German printers carried the new art of printing over the Alps and set up the first press in Italy at the monastery of Subiaco, the third book they produced, and the first book printed in Italy to carry a date, 29 October 1465, was Lactantius. The Institutes quote Greek in a good many places, so the printers had to cut a Greek fount before they could set him. A fount is the complete set of metal letters a printer has to own before he can set a single line, and theirs is reckoned the first type ever cut as Greek for a press. The two dates attached to his own name are nothing like as solid. No source gives the year he was born, and none gives the year he died. The c. 250 is arithmetic worked backwards from his career, and the c. 325 is a convention, which is why both of them carry that little "c.", short for the Latin circa, about.

(●) c. 250 AD: He was born somewhere in Roman Africa, and no ancient writer records the year, the town, or his parents. + His full name comes down as Lucius Caecilius Firmianus Lactantius, which is a good deal of name for a man nobody can put a birthday on. Jerome, the scholar behind the Latin Bible the West would read for the next thousand years and the compiler, around 393, of the first catalogue of Christian authors, does not file him under the name the world ended up using. He files him under Firmianus: "Firmianus, known also as Lactantius, a disciple of Arnobius" (Jerome, On Illustrious Men 80). Arnobius taught rhetoric, the training that produced Rome’s advocates and officials, at Sicca in the African province under Diocletian, and that one line of Jerome’s is what puts the young Lactantius in a North African lecture room some time in the 270s or 280s. Even that much is not certain. Jerome calls Arnobius his teacher here, while elsewhere he simply lists the two men side by side as contemporaries, and there is nothing in either man’s books that obviously connects them, so some scholars have quietly dropped the link. What is not in doubt is the education. Lactantius writes like a man who had Cicero by heart and Virgil and Lucretius close behind, who could quote a Stoic back at a Stoic and an Epicurean back at an Epicurean, those being the two schools that furnished most educated Romans with whatever philosophy they had, and who had read enough Roman antiquarian scholarship to argue about the gods out of the pagans’ own reference books. He was not a Christian when he learned any of that. He was a professional, trained in the ordinary way for the ordinary career, and it is the whole reason his later books read as they do. Every handbook prints his birth year with a "c." in front of it, and the handbooks do not agree with each other: some say around 240, some 250, some 260. The figure is worked out from Jerome’s remark that he was in extreme old age when Constantine made him a prince’s tutor in 317, and from the length of the career that must already have been behind him when he reached Nicomedia. It is an estimate resting on an estimate, and nothing on the record fixes it.

(●) c. 290 AD: Diocletian summoned him across the empire to teach Latin in the eastern capital, where hardly anyone wanted to learn it, and somewhere in those empty years he became a Christian. + Nicomedia, on the Sea of Marmara in what is now north-western Turkey, was where the emperor Diocletian actually lived. Rome had the Senate and the temples and the memory; Nicomedia had the palace, the mint, the arms factory and the court, and a man who wanted to be near power went east. Diocletian was building the place up, and an imperial city needed an imperial professor of Latin rhetoric. He sent for one from Africa. No source dates the summons: the handbooks put it around 290, some scholars push it later into the decade, and the only fixed point is that he was still in the post when the persecution began in 303. The word rhetoric has drifted a long way since then. Today it usually means the empty or slippery part of a speech, the bit a listener is supposed to see through. In the third century it meant the whole training that produced advocates and administrators: how to arrange an argument so that it lands in the right order, how to find the proofs actually available to you, how to speak for an hour without notes and hold a hostile room. The teacher who ran that training was a public figure, salaried by the city or the emperor, and the good ones were as well known in their cities as a celebrated barrister is now. Then came the part that nobody plans for. Nicomedia spoke Greek. Jerome puts it flatly: Lactantius "taught rhetoric there and on account of his lack of pupils (since it was a Greek city) he betook himself to writing" (Jerome, On Illustrious Men 80). An African Latinist at the top of his profession had been brought fifteen hundred miles to a lecture room that stayed empty, and he filled the hours with a pen. Everything Jerome credits him with before the persecution is lost: a banquet-piece written back in Africa as a young man, a travel poem about the journey out written in hexameters, the long six-beat line that Latin kept for epic, and a book called The Grammarian. The habit those books gave him is the reason anything of his survives at all. Somewhere in this stretch he became a Christian. He never says when it happened, or why, or who it was that talked to him, and no other ancient writer knows either. A man who would spend seven books explaining the faith to strangers left not one sentence explaining how he came to it himself, and we simply do not know.

(●) 23 February 303 AD: The Great Persecution began in the street where he worked, and he gave up his chair. + He wrote the morning down himself, years later. The authorities had picked their date with a certain grim wit: the feast of the god Terminus, who ended things, for the day they meant to end Christianity. "When that day dawned," he says, "in the eighth consulship of Diocletian and seventh of Maximian, suddenly, while it was yet hardly light, the prefect, together with chief commanders, tribunes, and officers of the treasury, came to the church in Nicomedia, and the gates having been forced open, they searched everywhere for an image of the Divinity. The books of the Holy Scriptures were found, and they were committed to the flames" (Of the Manner in Which the Persecutors Died 12). The church stood on rising ground in full view of the palace windows, close enough that the whole search could be followed from indoors. Diocletian and Galerius, the junior emperor who had pressed hardest for the persecution, stood arguing about whether to burn the building, Diocletian objecting that a fire that size might take the neighbouring streets with it. The Praetorian Guard, the emperor’s own household troops, settled the question with axes and had the church flat by mid-morning. The next day an edict stripped Christians of rank, of standing in court, of the protection of the law. A man tore the notice down and said something sarcastic about triumphs over Goths and Sarmatians, and was burned alive for it. That was the first morning of what later ages would call the Great Persecution, the last and the worst of the empire-wide attempts to put an end to the church. Lactantius was there. In the fifth book of the Institutes he gives the only autobiographical sentence he ever wrote about it: "When I was teaching rhetorical learning in Bithynia, having been called there, and it had happened that at the same time the temple of God was overthrown, there were living at the same place two men who insulted the truth as it lay prostrate and overthrown" (Divine Institutes V.2). Bithynia is the province Nicomedia stood in, so he is talking about the men at the next desk. One of the two, he says, was a philosopher who preached poverty and dined rather better at his own table than he did at the palace, and who published three books against the Christians at the exact moment they were being arrested. The other was a judge, and Lactantius says he wrote his two books while helping to run the persecution he was writing in favour of. He names neither man in that passage. The judge is almost certainly Hierocles, whom Eusebius of Caesarea, the bishop whose history of the church is the other great source for these years, answered by name for that very attack, and whom Lactantius does name elsewhere: "who from a deputy became president of Bithynia, the author and adviser of the persecution" (Of the Manner in Which the Persecutors Died 16). So the Divine Institutes were never a seminar project, and they do not read like one. They were begun by a man who had lost his living, in a city where the churches were rubble, as a direct answer to two books written by the people doing the arresting.

(●) c. 303 to 311 AD: Out of work and often hungry, he wrote the seven books of the Divine Institutes. + Jerome, who admired the prose and disliked the theology, is also the one who records what the years cost him. Writing up the year 317 in his Chronicle, he calls Lactantius the most eloquent man of his day, and adds in the same breath that "he was in fact a pauper in this life, as he generally lacked even the necessities" (Jerome, Chronicle, at the year 317, in Roger Pearse’s online translation). A former imperial professor with no students, no salary and no safe way to earn one, writing seven books in a police state. The seven books climb in order, and the order is the argument. Book I takes apart the worship of the traditional gods, using Roman scholars on Roman religion. Book II asks where the error came from and answers with the origin of evil. Book III goes through the philosophers one by one and finds that none of them arrived at a way of life anyone could actually live. Book IV turns the corner and says that the wisdom the philosophers were hunting and the religion the priests were performing are the same thing, and that the two meet in Christ. Book V is on justice, Book VI on what a worshipper actually owes God and his neighbour, and Book VII on the end of the world and what a human being is for. A reader who started at the temple door and kept going was carried all the way to the last judgment without once being asked, at any point along the way, to take the Christian Scriptures on trust before he was ready to. Two shorter books belong to the same stretch, and both are addressed to friends by name. On the Workmanship of God, written for a former pupil called Demetrianus, walks through the human body, bone by bone and sense by sense, as an argument that something intended all this. On the Anger of God, written for Donatus, argues that a God who cannot be angry cannot love either. Neither is long. Both were written by a man with time on his hands and nothing else.

(●) c. 313 to 315 AD: He wrote down how the persecutors died, and in doing so preserved the document that ended the persecution. + The book is called Of the Manner in Which the Persecutors Died, and it is addressed to Donatus, the same friend as before. Donatus had been arrested, handed from one official to the next, and tortured on nine separate occasions without giving way, and Lactantius says so in the text. That is the man the book is written for, and it explains a great deal about the tone, because the tone is fierce. Emperor after emperor is taken through his illness and his end in clinical detail, and the author is not sorry about any of it. He states his thesis in the first paragraph and never qualifies it: God delayed His punishment so that the examples would be unmistakable. Set the tone aside, though, and what is left is a first-rate historical source, because Lactantius was in the room for a great deal of it and copied out documents he had lying in front of him. Two of those copies changed what later ages could know. Chapter 48 carries the full text of the letter that Licinius issued at Nicomedia in June 313, agreed with Constantine at Milan, which is why the world calls it the Edict of Milan: "it was proper that the Christians and all others should have liberty to follow that mode of religion which to each of them appeared best." The Latin of that letter survives here and nowhere else. Chapter 44 carries the other one. Before the battle at the Milvian Bridge, the fight outside Rome that made Constantine master of the western half of the empire, "Constantine was directed in a dream to cause the heavenly sign to be delineated on the shields of his soldiers, and so to proceed to battle." That is the earliest surviving account of the most famous conversion story in Roman history, and the striking thing about it is how small and quiet it is. A dream, a mark chalked on shields the night before, and a battle the next day. The blazing cross in the afternoon sky, with words written across it for a whole army to read, belongs to Eusebius, writing later and saying he had it from the emperor himself.

(●) 317 AD: In extreme old age Constantine sent for him, and made him tutor to his eldest son in Gaul. + Crispus was Constantine’s son by his first marriage, and in 317 his father made him Caesar, a junior emperor, and posted him to Trier on the Rhine frontier to learn the trade. A prince needed a Latin master, and the emperor sent for the best one alive. Jerome records the appointment in the Chronicle at that year: Crispus and his brother and Licinius’ son were made Caesars, and Lactantius, the most eloquent man of his day, taught Crispus his Latin letters. Jerome says the same thing in his catalogue of authors: "In his extreme old age he was tutor to Crispus Caesar a son of Constantine in Gaul" (On Illustrious Men 80). It is a strange and rather moving appointment. The man had been hired by Diocletian, and had watched Diocletian’s prefect burn the Scriptures a few hundred yards from his own lecture room. Fourteen years later the next emperor but three was paying him to teach a Christian prince his letters. Jerome does not leave the story there, and the ending is the part that stays with a person. He notes the appointment, and then at the year 326 records what became of the pupil: Crispus and the younger Licinius, Constantine’s nephew by his sister Constantia, both most cruelly killed. Constantine had his own son put to death that year, for reasons no ancient source is willing to state plainly. Whether Lactantius was alive to hear of it, nobody knows.

(●) c. 325 AD: He died, and no ancient source records when, where, or how. + For a man whose books were read without a break for the next thousand years, he goes out of the record very quietly indeed. There is no death notice, no burial, no epitaph, no letter from a friend saying that the old professor had gone. The c. 325 that the handbooks print is a convention: it is roughly where he must have stopped, given that Jerome calls him extremely old in 317 and that nothing later is written by him or about him as a living man. Some books say 320 instead, and neither figure rests on a record. His books had very different fortunes. The Divine Institutes went everywhere, in dozens of manuscripts, and were being copied and read without interruption from his own century to the invention of printing. His account of the persecutors nearly went under: it survives in a single medieval manuscript from the abbey of Moissac, which the French scholar Étienne Baluze found in Colbert’s library at Paris and printed in 1679. One copy, carried out of one French monastery, is all that stood between the world and losing the Latin of the Edict of Milan.

What He Taught

(T1) Refuting an accuser is not the same work as teaching a beginner, and the church had so far done only the first. + Imagine a man who has heard that the people down the road eat babies at their meetings. A neighbour takes the trouble to sit him down and show him that the story is nonsense: nobody eats anybody, here is what actually happens at the meeting, here are the witnesses. The man goes home satisfied. He now knows one thing that Christians do not do, and nothing at all about what they believe, or why anyone would join them. Lactantius looked at the Latin Christian bookshelf and saw that it was entirely made of that conversation. He names the men and he is polite about them. Tertullian pleaded the same cause in the Apology, he says, but Tertullian’s Latin is rough and obscure, and he never found his audience. Cyprian is the best writer of the three, warm and clear and persuasive, but he made one mistake in the book against Demetrianus: he answered a man who thought the Scriptures were fables by quoting the Scriptures at him. You cannot feed solid food to an infant, Lactantius says; you begin with milk. With a reader who holds your holy books to be "vain, fictitious, and false," you lay them aside for a while and argue instead from the authorities he already trusts, his own philosophers, his own historians, his own poets, until his eyes have adjusted enough to bear the light. So the title matters, and he chose it deliberately. Institutiones, "Institutes," was the word a Roman jurist used for the textbook he wrote for first-year students, an orderly course from first principles up, the sort of thing a young man bought in his first term of law. Nobody had used the word of the Christian faith before. Lactantius was announcing that he meant to write the first Christian textbook, and he wanted his readers to hear the announcement in the title itself. The method has a price, though, and he pays it in full. An author who has promised not to lean on Scripture while his pagan reader is still finding his feet has to lean on something, and Lactantius leans on two collections of pagan writing that he believed were very old. One is the Sibylline oracles, Greek verses attributed to the Sibyls, the prophetesses the ancient world credited with foretelling the future, and passed around as the oldest pagan prophecy there was. The other is the Hermetic books, philosophical and religious treatises in Greek that went under the name of Hermes Trismegistus, an Egyptian sage supposed to have lived long before Plato. Lactantius took both for genuine pre-Christian witnesses who had somehow arrived at Christian conclusions on their own. Later scholarship has shown that they are nothing of the kind, and it is the one place where his whole method turns out to have been resting on sand.

(Q) "Inasmuch as it is one thing to answer accusers, which consists in defense or denial only, and another thing to instruct, which we do, in which the substance of the whole system must be contained, I have not shrunk from this labour." + Source: Lactantius, Divine Institutes V.4 (Fletcher translation, Ante-Nicene Fathers). He is explaining, part way through the fifth book, why he thought a seventh-hand apology was not worth writing and a first-hand textbook was. The chapter heading the old editors gave it is exact: "Why This Work Was Published."

(T2) Wisdom and worship are two halves of one thing, and each of them is ruined when it is taken alone. + Lactantius had spent his life within walking distance of both failures. On one side of Nicomedia were the philosophers, men who could argue for hours about whether the divine nature was one or many and who never in their lives knelt to it or asked it for anything. On the other side were the temples, where the business of religion was conducted with the hands and the fingers, an animal killed, a formula said, a duty discharged, and where nobody was expected to have an opinion about whether any of it was true. One camp thought about God without worshipping. The other worshipped without thinking. He judged both to be halves of a man. His name for the whole thing is sapientia joined to religio. Wisdom, in his use, is knowing who God is. Religion, in his use, is the honour you pay him once you know. The two are not neighbours who ought to get along; they are the same act described from two sides, and pulling them apart kills them both. Take religion away from wisdom and you have a clever man with nothing to be clever about. Take wisdom away from religion and you have a man kneeling to something he has never troubled to identify, which is why the Greek and Roman cults could carry on for centuries without ever settling what their own gods were. He puts it in an image that stays with a reader. Wisdom and religion are two streams running out of one spring, and the spring is God. Turn either stream away from its source and it dries in the bed. That is why he could write a book about the gods and a book about philosophy and think of them as one argument: the philosophers and the priests had each got hold of one end of something that only works whole.

(Q) "Religion, therefore, cannot be divided from wisdom, nor can wisdom be separated from religion; because it is the same God, who ought to be understood, which is the part of wisdom, and to be honoured, which is the part of religion." + Source: Lactantius, Divine Institutes IV.4 (Fletcher translation, Ante-Nicene Fathers). The fourth book is where the whole work turns from demolition to construction, and this sentence is the hinge of it. A few lines later comes the image of the two streams and the one fountain.

(T3) Justice has two parts, and the second is making yourself the equal of every other person alive. + Roman moralists had a word, pietas, for the debts you owe upwards and outwards: to the gods, to your father, to your country. Lactantius keeps the word and gives it one object, God. Then he says that justice has a second part, and he borrows Cicero’s word for it, aequitas, fairness, which he immediately defines in a way Cicero would not have recognised. It does not mean judging fairly, he says, though judging fairly is a fine thing. It means making yourself equal to other people. He then says what that rules out, and here is where the argument bites. A society arranged in steps from the beggar to the emperor, with every rung defended, cannot be a just society, because where men are not equally matched there is no fairness, and without fairness justice has nothing to stand on. Rome ran on those steps. So did Greece. So, he adds, that is why neither of them ever had justice, whatever their orators said on public holidays. He cashes it out in two places that leave no room for misunderstanding. The first is the amphitheatre. A man who enjoys watching a condemned criminal killed in front of him, he writes, has stained himself as thoroughly as if he had done a murder in private; and Christians who keep to justice cannot be "companions and sharers in this public homicide" (Divine Institutes VI.20). He describes the crowd voting for the finishing stroke, calling for fresh men when one dies too fast, growing angry at the delays, and he says that the habit costs them their humanity by degrees. The second is the newborn left out at the roadside, which was the ordinary and perfectly legal Roman way of declining a child you could not afford. Lactantius refuses the usual defence, that exposing a baby is gentler than strangling it, and he refuses it bluntly. The child goes to the dogs or it goes to a brothel, and the parent who arranged not to find out which is not thereby innocent: "it is therefore as wicked to expose as it is to kill." Then there is the case a modern reader reaches for straight away, and it deserves a plain answer. Rome ran on slaves, and a man who has just written that justice means making yourself the equal of every other person alive is standing very close indeed to saying that the slave markets ought to be shut. He does not say it. What he says is that before God the categories do not exist at all, that in a Christian household master and slave are brothers in spirit whatever the law outside the door may hold (Galatians 3:28), and that the man who puts himself lowest stands highest. That is a real claim, and it did real work over the centuries, and it is still not the same claim as abolition. The step from the one to the other took the church a very long time.

(Q) "For God, who produces and gives breath to men, willed that all should be equal, that is, equally matched. He has imposed on all the same condition of living; He has produced all to wisdom; He has promised immortality to all; no one is cut off from His heavenly benefits. For as He distributes to all alike His one light, sends forth His fountains to all, supplies food, and gives the most pleasant rest of sleep; so He bestows on all equity and virtue. In His sight no one is a slave, no one a master; for if all have the same Father, by an equal right we are all children." + Source: Lactantius, Divine Institutes V.15 (Fletcher translation, Ante-Nicene Fathers). The argument runs on from here to the sentence a modern reader is least likely to expect: that no one is poor in God’s sight except the man without justice, and no one rich except the man full of virtues.

(T4) Religion is the one thing that cannot be compelled, and force destroys the very thing it is meant to defend. + Picture the queue. The Roman machinery for suppressing Christians, both the version the emperor Decius had built two generations earlier and the version Diocletian ran in Lactantius’ own street, did not ask anybody to curse Christ. That would have been crude, and it was not necessary. It asked for a sacrifice in front of a commission, a taste of the meat, and a signed certificate confirming that the thing had been done. A man could hand in that certificate and tell himself all the way home that he had not meant a word of it. Lactantius had watched neighbours stand in that queue. He knew exactly what a coerced act of worship looks like from the inside, and it is why the argument he makes is not the one a modern reader expects. He does not plead for tolerance on the grounds that Christians are harmless citizens who pay their taxes, though he could have. He grants the other side its best premise first: religion is the most important thing there is, and a man is right to want to defend it with everything he has. Then he says the defenders have misunderstood what kind of thing they are defending. Worship is an act of the will, and the will is the only human faculty that cannot be reached from outside. Put a man on the rack and you can make his body do anything; you cannot make his mind mean it. So the moment you bring in the sword, whatever you end up with is no longer religion. It has been "polluted and profaned," and the word he uses for what happens to it is the word for a temple defiled. The consequence he draws is the hard one, and he draws it without flinching: religion is properly defended by dying rather than by killing. He wrote that as a persecuted man about persecutors. What he could not have foreseen is how soon Christians would hold the sword themselves, and how many centuries would pass before the argument in this chapter was taken up again by people who had the power to ignore it.

(Q) "For if you wish to defend religion by bloodshed, and by tortures, and by guilt, it will no longer be defended, but will be polluted and profaned. For nothing is so much a matter of free-will as religion; in which, if the mind of the worshipper is disinclined to it, religion is at once taken away, and ceases to exist." + Source: Lactantius, Divine Institutes V.20 (Fletcher translation, Ante-Nicene Fathers). The sentences immediately before it set out the rule the chapter is famous for: "religion is to be defended, not by putting to death, but by dying; not by cruelty, but by patient endurance; not by guilt, but by good faith."

(T5) God’s anger is not a flaw in his love but the same love seen from the other side. + Two schools of philosophy had the field when Lactantius wrote, and both of them had removed anger from God. The Epicureans, the followers of Epicurus, held that the gods were perfectly happy and therefore perfectly uninvolved: they neither punish nor reward, and the whole apparatus of prayer is wasted breath. The Stoics, who thought the universe was governed by a rational and benevolent order, kept the kindness and dropped the wrath: God does good to everyone and is angry with nobody. The second position sounded devout, and Lactantius thought it was the more dangerous of the two. His reply starts with an ordinary household. A man has two servants, one honest and one a thief. If he treats them identically, gives both the same wages and the same trust and the same praise, nobody would call him kind; they would call him a fool, and the honest servant would be the one he had wronged. Approval and disapproval are not two separate faculties that a good master happens to have. They are one faculty pointed in two directions, and a master with only one of them has neither. So with God: if he is not angry at cruelty, he does not love the people cruelty is done to. Anger and love come out of the same root, and cutting off the one kills the other. Paul had said as much in a sentence, that the wrath of God stands revealed from heaven against ungodliness (Romans 1:18). The same book is also where the problem of evil gets its oldest surviving statement in the four-clause form it has kept ever since, because Lactantius quotes his opponent at full strength before answering him. "God, he says, either wishes to take away evils, and is unable; or He is able, and is unwilling; or He is neither willing nor able, or He is both willing and able. If He is willing and is unable, He is feeble, which is not in accordance with the character of God; if He is able and unwilling, He is envious, which is equally at variance with God; if He is neither willing nor able, He is both envious and feeble, and therefore not God; if He is both willing and able, which alone is suitable to God, from what source then are evils? Or why does He not remove them?" (On the Anger of God 13). He even concedes, in the next breath, that a good many defenders of providence have been driven back by it. His own answer is that evil is the material wisdom has to work on. Take away everything bitter and you take away every occasion for a choice, and a creature who has never once had to weigh one thing against another has nothing to be wise about, much as a man who has never been near deep water can hardly be called a strong swimmer. So what would be lost along with the evils, he argues, is worth more than what would be gained by their going. Christian readers have generally found that answer much too small for the question it is answering, and the thinkers who came after him took other roads. But Lactantius was honest enough to write his opponent’s objection out at full strength before he replied to it, and that one decision had consequences he could not possibly have imagined.

(Q) "For if God is not angry with the impious and the unrighteous, it is clear that He does not love the pious and the righteous. Therefore the error of those is more consistent who take away at once both anger and kindness. For in opposite matters it is necessary to be moved to both sides or to neither. Thus, he who loves the good also hates the wicked, and he who does not hate the wicked does not love the good." + Source: Lactantius, On the Anger of God 5 (Fletcher translation, Ante-Nicene Fathers). He is answering the Stoics, who had made God kind and never angry, and the middle sentences give the Epicureans their due: at least they took the kindness away along with the anger instead of keeping half a God. The chapter closes with the two servants, and the point that a master who honours the thief along with the honest man is not merciful but unjust.

(Q) "Behold, all the adversaries are destroyed, and tranquillity having been re-established throughout the Roman empire, the late oppressed Church arises again, and the temple of God, overthrown by the hands of the wicked, is built with more glory than before." + Source: Lactantius, Of the Manner in Which the Persecutors Died 1 (Fletcher translation, Ante-Nicene Fathers). The opening paragraph, addressed to Donatus, who had been tortured nine times and had not given way. The temple of God he means is a particular building: the church at Nicomedia that he had watched the Praetorian Guard level in a few hours, ten years earlier and a short walk from his own lecture room.

What the Church Made of Him

(†) He gave the Latin West its first complete statement of the faith, and its only full copy of the law that ended the persecution. + The Institutes did what he built them to do. For a Latin reader between the fourth century and the twelfth, this was the book that laid the whole thing out in order, and the manuscripts show it: they are everywhere, in every kind of library, copied steadily for a thousand years. Jerome catalogued him respectfully, singling out On the Anger of God as "a most beautiful one." Augustine, who was not easily impressed by other people’s apologetics, went to him for material: in the City of God he takes the prophecies of Christ that Lactantius had quoted piecemeal from a Sibylline poem and reassembles them into one continuous passage, telling the reader exactly whose collection he is drawing on (City of God XVIII.23). The other debt is historical rather than theological, and it is enormous. Everything a modern reader knows about the beginning of the Great Persecution at Nicomedia, about the deaths of Galerius and Maximin Daia, about the dream before the Milvian Bridge, and about the terms on which Constantine and Licinius agreed to stop the killing, comes in the first instance from a man who was in the city and copied the paperwork. The letter of 313 survives in Greek in Eusebius and in Latin here alone. When the historians of the fourth century and after wanted to know what had happened in their grandparents’ lifetime, this unemployed professor was the witness they had.

(†) The Renaissance made him a school text and called him the Christian Cicero. + Humanists cared about Latin the way a musician cares about intonation, and by that standard Lactantius was the best writer the early church had produced. Jerome had said so first, in a line every Renaissance schoolmaster knew by heart: "Lactantius has a flow of eloquence worthy of Tully," Tully being Cicero (Jerome, Letter 58.10). A schoolboy could be given Lactantius and learn his Christianity and his prose style out of the same book, which is precisely what happened across fifteenth-century Italy. The proof is a date. In the 1460s two German printers, Conrad Sweynheym and Arnold Pannartz, brought the new art of printing south and set up a press at the Benedictine monastery of Subiaco, in the hills east of Rome. They produced four books there. The third was the works of Lactantius, finished on 29 October 1465, and it is the first book printed in Italy that carries a date at all. It has a second distinction: the Institutes quote Greek in a number of places, and to set those passages the printers had to cut a Greek fount, reckoned the first type ever cut as Greek. Fust and Schoeffer had printed a few Greek words at Mainz that same year, pieced together out of roman letters bent to the purpose, but the Subiaco Greek was drawn as Greek from the start. The book that taught the Latin West its catechism also taught the Italian press how to print Greek.

(†) His statement of the problem of evil, and his case for freedom of conscience, outlived almost everything else he wrote. + Two paragraphs of his have gone further than the seven books they sit in, and both went further because he had set out the other side’s case so well. The first is the dilemma about God and evil that he attributes to Epicurus and answers in On the Anger of God (T5). No pagan source preserves it in that shape; the reason it exists in four crisp clauses is that a Christian apologist wrote it down in order to answer it. Fourteen centuries later David Hume gave it to the sceptic Philo in the Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, in a form anyone who has read Lactantius recognises at once: "Epicurus's old questions are yet unanswered. Is he willing to prevent evil, but not able? then is he impotent. Is he able, but not willing? then is he malevolent. Is he both able and willing? whence then is evil?" It is one of the odder services the early church did for its critics. The second is the argument that a religion defended by force is destroyed by the defence (T4). It went quiet for a long stretch, for the obvious reason: once the empire was Christian, its rulers found the chapter inconvenient, and the men who could have acted on it were the men with the least reason to read it. It came back into circulation when Christians began arguing with each other about conscience and the sword, and it has been quoted in that argument ever since, always by somebody pointing out that the case was made from inside the church, by a man watching his own neighbours being tortured, more than a thousand years before anybody called it toleration.

(†) He was a better demolisher than teacher, and he was wrong about the Holy Spirit, about the calendar, and about the shape of the earth. + Jerome, who preserved more of his reputation than anyone, also wrote the sentence that has followed him ever since: "Lactantius has a flow of eloquence worthy of Tully: would that he had been as ready to teach our doctrines as he was to pull down those of others" (Letter 58.10). It is a fair verdict, and it comes with a list. - The Holy Spirit. Jerome reports that Lactantius, in his books and above all in the lost letters to Demetrianus, denied that the Holy Spirit subsists as a person, and took the passages that speak of the Spirit to refer instead to the Father or to the Son (Letter 84.7). Nothing in the surviving works contradicts the report; the Spirit is simply missing where a reader expects him. Against that stand the words Christ himself used, "the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit" (Matthew 28:19), and the promise of the Helper "whom the Father will send in my name" (John 14:26). Lactantius was writing before the Council of Nicaea, the first gathering of bishops from across the whole empire and the council that began pinning down the language the church would use about the persons of God, so there was as yet no agreed vocabulary for him to reach for. That explains the gap without excusing it. - The devil in the wrong company. In the second book he tells how God, before making the world, "produced a Spirit like to Himself," and then "made another being, in whom the disposition of the divine origin did not remain," who spoiled himself with envy of the first and became the accuser (Divine Institutes II.9). He affirms creation out of nothing on the same page, and he is not saying the devil is the Son’s brother in the sense later heretics would mean it. But he has put the Son and the devil in one series of productions, and the church did not follow him there. - The calendar. Book VII works out from the six days of Genesis that the world runs for six thousand years and then rests for a thousand, and Book VII’s closing chapters add the arithmetic: on any reckoning then available, "all expectation does not exceed the limit of two hundred years" (Divine Institutes VII.14, VII.25). He was confident enough to write it down and wrong by a wide margin, and the warning against exactly that confidence had been on the record since the Ascension: "It is not for you to know times or seasons that the Father has fixed by his own authority" (Acts 1:7). - The antipodes. The antipodes are the lands on the opposite side of the globe from wherever you happen to be standing, and Greek geographers had been discussing whether anyone lived there for centuries. In the third book Lactantius ridicules the whole idea, asking whether anyone is senseless enough to believe in men whose footsteps are higher than their heads, and in crops that grow downwards (Divine Institutes III.24). Educated opinion in his own century mostly went the other way, so this is his own error rather than his age’s. Copernicus remembered it. Bracing himself in the preface to On the Revolutions for the mockery he expected, he named Lactantius as the example of a distinguished writer speaking childishly about a subject he had not studied. - The pagan witnesses. The method of T1 required ancient non-Christian testimony, and Lactantius reached for the Sibylline oracles and the Hermetic writings, treating both as old pagan prophecy that had somehow arrived at Christian conclusions. Both collections are now known to be far later than he thought, and shot through with Jewish and Christian composition. He argued in good faith from the best texts he had; the argument does not survive knowing what they are. That is the whole ledger, and what is not on it counts for something too. He was a layman, he held no office, he taught no heresy that anyone had to be assembled to condemn, and the worst that his severest ancient critic could find to say was that he was better at knocking down than at building up.