Lactantius

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Lactantius — Lucius Caecilius Firmianus Lactantius, active around 300 CE — was a Latin rhetorician of North African origin who, after his conversion, became the most polished Christian apologist of his generation. Later readers, struck by the classical clarity of his prose against the rougher Latin of his contemporaries, gave him the name by which he is still known: the Christian Cicero.

His career ran straight through the empire’s last great persecution. The emperor Diocletian had summoned him to the eastern capital at Nicomedia to teach Latin rhetoric; there, when the persecution of 303 broke, Lactantius lost his post and set about writing. The result was the Divine Institutes, a systematic defense of Christianity addressed not to the converted but to educated pagans — the first attempt to lay out the new religion as a coherent philosophy in the literary register such readers respected. In old age, under the changed sky of Constantine’s victory, he was appointed tutor to the emperor’s son Crispus.

What gives Lactantius his particular interest is the method of his argument. To persuade pagans, he reached for pagan authorities, holding that the wisest voices of the old world had themselves glimpsed the truths Christianity now proclaimed in full. Foremost among these witnesses he placed Hermes Trismegistus — the legendary Egyptian sage to whom a body of Greek philosophical and religious writing was ascribed — and the Sibyls, the prophetesses whose oracles circulated in collections of mixed Jewish, Christian, and pagan origin. He quoted both as if they confirmed the Christian account of God, creation, and the divine Word.

The consequence outran his intention. Several Hermetic passages he drew on survive only because he quoted them, preserving their Greek wording where the texts themselves were later lost; he thus became, against the grain of his own polemic, one of the channels through which the figure of Hermes Trismegistus reached the Latin West. When Renaissance scholars revived the Hermetic writings as supposed records of a primordial Egyptian theology, Lactantius’s endorsement lent the project the weight of an ancient and orthodox Christian name. The Sibylline material he treated as prophecy raised the same difficulty in reverse: modern scholarship reads much of it as the work of Hellenistic Jewish and Christian authors writing in a pagan voice, so that the witnesses Lactantius called independent were in part already his own side.

He was not a systematic theologian, and the later Church judged some of his positions unsafe; the humanists prized him chiefly as a stylist. The longer mark he left lies elsewhere — in the testimony he gathered to prove his case, which carried the pagan sages he meant to refute forward into the tradition that would one day take them for its own.

→ In the library: Terry — The Sibylline Oracles (1899) · The Corpus Hermeticum (Mead) — I. Poemandres

→ Related: Hermes Trismegistus · Divination · Neoplatonism · Logos