In his early fourth-century treatise De ira Dei, the Christian apologist Lactantius defends the existence of God’s wrath, and in so doing he articulates an argument that runs contrary to long-held tenets of Greek philosophical discourse, including the immutability and impassibility of the summus deus. Unlike his Graecophone predecessors and contemporaries, Lactantius ostensibly rejects the option of allegorical reading employed by Plato (among others) and fashions his approach as one superior to those of the philosophers (among whom he targets primarily the Stoics and Epicureans). Lactantius comes at the question of divine wrath from a literal, rather than allegorical or figural, perspective because he was immersed in a Roman rhetorical tradition that stood, or at least saw itself as standing, in contrast and at times in opposition to the tenets of the Greek philosophical tradition broadly construed. The apologist’s move is, as an indicator of his education in law and rhetoric, reflexive, and, in light of the degree to which he draws his reader’s attention to his method, self-conscious. It is also problematic: setting aside, for the moment, the apparent novelty of his theological claim, Lactantius’ dismissal of Plato and the philosophers glosses over a long doxographic tradition in which Lactantius himself is implicated, most obviously by his dependence on Cicero, whose role in the transmission of Greek philosophical ideas to the world of Roman intellectual culture cannot be overlooked in the consideration of any later Latinate author.
In what follows, I explore the moments at which Lactantius appears to engage with Plato or the philosophical traditions he associated with Plato, including Socrates, the Epicureans, and the Stoics. The reason for this grouping is twofold: first, it follows the framing of philosophical doxography that Lactantius himself maintains. Second, it echoes the relationships between philosophers that we find in the treatise itself. That is to say, Lactantius’ lumping together of all philosophers from Socrates through Seneca is conceptual and pragmatic, but this way of thinking about philosophy is also mapped onto the structure of the text itself. We shall see, then, that Lactantius engages with Greek philosophy and philosophers in strategic ways: he selectively quotes and paraphrases specific philosophers and philosophical schools in an attempt to establish a philosophical consensus to underscore his own arguments, for example those concerning the existence of only one god and divine providence. He breaks from them, however, when he wants to distinguish his view from those of his predecessors (and, we might add, his contemporaries), most clearly when he argues in favor of divine emotions.
A few words about the content and design of the treatise will help to contextualize this discussion. The text, written in 316CE, is addressed to a certain Donatus and its stated purpose is to correct the philosophers’ error in thinking that the supreme god does not get angry.259 As one would expect given Lactantius’ education in rhetoric and his professional activity as a rhetor, the organization of the text closely follows the standards articulated in Ciceronian treatises (e.g. De Oratore and the Topica) as well as other handbooks critical to classical and late antique Latin oratory (e. g. the Rhetorica ad Herennium).260 After a quickly presented exordium, narratio, and divisio, Lactantius moves on to a lengthy confirmatio in which he both advances his own arguments and attacks the opinions of others. With elements of confutatio worked into the main body of the text, the treatise ends with a three-chapter long conclusio, termed a “peroration in the matter of Cicero,” which Lactantius uses to recapitulate his previous points, add the testimony of the Sibyls, and give a final warning about the necessity of worshipping God correctly.261
A close reading of the claims asserted in the main body of the text illustrate the degree to which Lactantius closely followed Cicero’s De natura deorum in constructing his arguments.262 Both texts take the Epicureans and the Stoics as their main targets , for example, and both are fundamentally concerned with questions about the divine nature, an umbrella idea under which one also finds discussions about divine providence, divine administration of the world, that there can be only one god, and that this god cares for humankind.263 At every turn, Lactantius seeks to disprove his straw men philosophical opponents and to build an argument in favor of a legitimate and necessary divine wrath. The relative singularity of his stance should not be overlooked: in contrast to those who employed figural and allegorical readings to make sense of texts in which the supreme god’s anger was articulated or referenced, Lactantius goes to great lengths to prove that this anger was a veritable emotion, a view which directly opposes the long-standing philosophical tenets of divine impassibility and immutability.264
I have thus far highlighted Lactantius’ affinity for Cicero and for Latin rhetorical discourse more generally. To ignore these classical Roman underpinnings of the fourth century text would be to miss facets of the text critical to its interpretation: unlike his Graecophone counterparts, nearly all of whom were working within the constraints of a hermeneutic initiated, at least most clearly, by Plato, Lactantius engages in a literal reading and understanding of God’s wrath.265 Crucial elements of his reading were drawn from Ciceronian models, the most influential of which, on this text, was De natura deorum. This reliance complicates Lactantius’ text in two ways. First, it calls into question the identity of the Stoics and Epicureans to whom Lactantius responds in De ira Dei: these are unlikely to be the representatives of those philosophical schools as they existed in the early fourth century, and it remains doubtful that the Stoics and Epicureans of Cicero’s own text were accurate spokesmen of the schools in their late first-century BCE iterations.266
Second, Cicero himself was engaged in his own seemingly apologetic agenda, namely to make palatable to a Roman audience of the late Republic the ideas, terminology, and differences between the major philosophical schools. We might thus view Cicero as a model for Lactantius in yet another way: each sought to translate to his own audience (one Roman, the other Christian, or at least potentially so) the cultural precepts of another intellectual tradition in such a way as to make the adoption of those precepts acceptable and normative.267 Yet this transfer, or transmission, was complicated in each case by various factors. For Cicero, this included translation (and at times coinage of new words) from Greek to Latin, a conscious and theorized move on his part. For Lactantius, this included a perhaps less self-aware, or less easily evaluated, set of processes. This is particularly the case when one considers Plato, for we know that Cicero was reading and reacting to Plato and we know that Lactantius was reading and reacting to Cicero. At the risk of over-simplifying a complex, intricate, and quite lengthy doxographical history, we can say that Lactantius was reading (and in some cases agreeing with) Plato, in what was undoubtedly a diluted and muddied way, through his reading of Cicero.
Lactantius was not unaware of Plato’s influence on later philosophical thought: as we shall see below, in the ninth chapter of De ira Dei he describes the creation of and differentiation between the most popular philosophical schools as having “flowed forth from the school of Plato like rivulets into different directions.”268 It is perhaps because of the association that Lactantius constructs between Plato and, for all intents and purposes, every other philosopher and philosophical school of thought, that he tends to lump the major schools (again, for him, the Stoics and Epicureans) together with Plato in most of his discussions of philosophical consensus. Plato and Socrates are also often linked (the name Socrates appears with Plato’s in four out of five chapters in which the latter is mentioned), outstripped only by the invocation of “philosophers” more generally and the Stoics and Epicureans somewhat more specifically.269 The names of individual philosophers and the general term are sprinkled throughout the text, with one or the other appearing in seventeen of the twenty-three chapters. The way in which Lactantius mentions and engages with the philosophers, individually and collectively, varies by the area or chapter of the text in which they appear. We shall evaluate Lactantius’ concentrated treatment of Plato, Socrates, and others below (chapters nine through eleven of the text); my present concern is with the ways in which such notes and mentions are scattered throughout the treatise.
From the outset, Lactantius situates his text both within the long-standing philosophical conversation about the place of emotions in the supreme god and at the same time opposed to it. In the opening chapter, he tells Donatus, his addressee, that “some philosophers” have (wrongly) held the opinion that God does not get angry.270 He goes on to use the assertion of Socrates “as related by Plato” that there is no such thing as human wisdom—a compliment, on the face of it—only to underscore the philosophers’ folly in thinking that they can ascertain the divine will, and soon after to place them on the second of three “steps” by which an individual comes to know God.271 Epicurus is twice attacked, in chapters four and five, for his belief that the summus deus is aloof and unfeeling; similarly the Stoics were wrong, Lactantius says, to attribute only kindness (gratia) to God and not anger as well.272 This introduction leads Lactantius to his own formulation: it is unfathomable that God has no emotions; unfeasible for him to have anger alone; everyone believes that he has kindness; therefore he must also have anger—an idea that the apologist links to the need for a veritable fear of God as part of his worship.273
Lactantius connects, however weakly, the strong statements of chapter six to longer, more robust chapters in the middle of the treatise. These sections are largely meant to establish a sort of philosophical consensus: everyone, he writes, agrees that humans are different than animals, and although some disagree on the questions of, inter alia, divine providence, those who are reasonable would support what Lactantius himself is arguing. He goes on to praise the Stoics for recognizing that all things were made for the benefit of mankind (unlike some other philosophical sects) and to criticize Epicurus for not understanding the difference between human and divine natures (and by extension, emotions).274 Thus far a tendency has emerged: Lactantius is often willing to follow the Stoics up to a point, but is vehemently opposed to nearly all of the arguments put forth by Epicurus.275 A fuller consideration of the ways in which Lactantius relies upon previous philosophical argument and consensus as he seeks to support and strengthen his own claims will help to elucidate the nuances of his argument.
The philosophical voices of the past are marshaled by Lactantius in three key chapters of the text. It is in these chapters (namely nine, ten, and eleven), that the apologist strives to convince his audience that (1) there is one god, (2) this god created the world, and (3) there exists a divine providence whereby the world is regulated. Perhaps interestingly, Lactantius flips the order in which these are presented: he begins with divine providence, next discusses the creation and creator of the world, then moves on to a consideration of monotheism (although this does allow him to return to providence, his main concern).276 Often viewed as tangential, overly-long digressions from his central argument, these chapters are, I would suggest, critical to Lactantius’ overall purpose in the treatise. If we consider their relevance to the content of his argument alone, it is evident that they are imperative to understanding his view of the divine nature, a position which has definite implications for his framing of divine emotions—how one imagines the divine nature by necessity has bearing on whether or not, and how, one views the possibility of that divine nature possessing emotions. Beyond their importance to the line of argument, however, these three chapters are likewise key to how Lactantius formulates, defends, and structures his claims. At various moments in each chapter, Lactantius targets specific philosophers with whom he finds the multitude of philosophers to be in disagreement. The result is to create the effect of a triangulation: philosophers who held the “wrong” opinion are demonstrated to have done so by those who hold the “correct” opinion (in Lactantius’ estimation), and Lactantius provides himself with the opportunity of criticizing or supporting each view.
Epicurus is the principal target of Lactantius’ attack, and is identified as such in chapter eight, which we might consider a preamble to the subsequent three chapters (nine through eleven). Indeed, Lactantius’ vehement opposition to the views of Epicurus about the nature of religion link the material that follows this chapter with that which preceded it: we have learned thus far that the treatise is concerned with the refutation of the supreme god’s impassibility, here the necessity for divine emotions is couched in terms of their connection to religion. If Epicurus, writes Lactantius, thinks that the gods must be removed and withdrawn from humans and all pains, he removes all agency from them. Such a divine nature in turn renders human action without consequence, argues Lactantius, for there would be no point in offering sacrifice, building temples, and otherwise engaging in various types of religious, pious behavior if no one is paying any attention.277 Terrible consequences abound: if no god watches over and keeps tracks of (and, importantly, reacts to) human life, there is nothing to prevent people from breaking laws and religion itself is thoroughly destroyed.278 In addition to outlining for us one of the ways in which religion is linked to the preservation of human order, Lactantius’ statements about religion highlight the degree to which he sees it as inseparable from divine emotions. He proceeds to lay out a series of connections that link religion to wisdom (which separates humans from animals) and to justice (which regulates public institutions), and to respond to the claims of those who challenge the existence of God.279
Lactantius’ first sentence sets the tone for the following three chapters: “philosophers of former times had agreed in their opinions… and there was no doubt…”280 By forcing his audience to think back to the distant past (as he understood it), Lactantius establishes a pattern wherein consensus existed, was challenged, but maintained its place as the dominant belief. In chapter nine, the challenge, Lactantius tells us, came from Protagoras, “in the times of Socrates,” and had as its object the question of the existence of any divinity.281 To underscore the novelty and shock value of such claims, Lactantius rehearses the tradition of the Athenians burning Protagoras’ books and exiling him from the city and then dismisses him (because “there is no need to speak respecting his opinions, because he pronounced nothing certain”).282 Socrates, Plato, the Stoics, and the Peripatetics are said to reinstate the firm belief in a divinity until the usual suspect, Epicurus, intervenes, and threatens the status quo. Here, as in chapter eight and elsewhere, Epicurus is an outsider: he agrees, Lactantius tells us, that there is a God (and so subscribes to the philosophical consensus), but he denies that there exists a divine providence.283 The removal of divine providence is equivalent to the removal of the divine altogether, and Lactantius requires the world to be one in which its divine ruler has knowledge of the past, present, and future.284
Similarly, Diagoras of Melos and Theodorus of Cyrene are also singled out as philosophers who denied the existence of God, while Plato, Socrates, and those that maintained the tenets of their philosophical arguments are praised for their wisdom. If we are to believe Lactantius, it was these three philosophers (Epicurus, Diagoras, and Theodorus) who attacked the idea of divine providence and every other philosopher who defended it.285 A rhetorical series of questions at the end of chapter nine offers not merely Lactantius’ plan for moving ahead, but also a framework for understanding his own approach. Should we, he questions, argue against those “trifling and inactive philosophers by reason, or by the authority of distinguished men, or rather by both?”286 Here Lactantius reveals his own debt to and dependence on the Platonic philosophical tradition, and in so doing admits that his construal of his own perspective as existing in stark opposition to that of the philosophers is not entirely true: the “authority of distinguished men” does, in fact, carry some weight, and when that authority is useful to his argument he has no qualms about drawing our attention to that long-standing history, here providence, which “had been asserted and defended through so many ages by so many intellects.”287 Further, Lactantius’ overview of such debates, although admittedly brief and superficial, has the effect of suggesting his familiarity with the respective traditions and of aligning his perspective with the Platonic tradition: consensus is important here for the way in which it lends support to Lactantius himself.288
Although Lactantius himself eventually deviates from the philosophical consensus about divine wrath, he expresses an antagonism towards Straton, Leucippus, and others throughout the tenth chapter of the treatise because of their need to be different and break from the consensus. Despite his expressed concern that he might seem to rave for refuting such ludicrous ideas, he nonetheless devotes much of this chapter to a mockery-filled discussion concerning how theories about atoms as the constituent building blocks of creation can be nothing but nonsense.289 Lactantius’ defense of this claim rests predominantly upon his oft-repeated notion that the nature of the world and all things within it offer ample proof that their creation required design, reason, forethought, and intelligence.290 Here too, Lactantius summons the philosophical consensus of the past: whether they attributed it to nature or the supreme god, many agreed that the world itself was set in motion by some entity which possessed the ability to order and to fashion its creation. His strategy here, however, is not to mention individuals who helped to form the consensus (e. g. Plato and Socrates) as previously, but rather to attack Lucretius (or, perhaps, “Lucretius”) with an uninterrupted torrent of points to be disputed.
Lucretius’ theories about atoms strike Lactantius as particularly offensive and unbelievable. In addition to his consternation regarding the unimaginably small size of these atoms and their different shapes, Lactantius fixates on their invisibility and indivisibility, in each case referring to Lucretius as his source.291 Although we might be tempted to gloss over his rebuttals to these ideas, many of which are framed as rhetorical questions, to do so would be to overlook two important elements underpinning Lactantius’ worldview and reasoning. His discomfort, for example, with the idea that everything is created by and made up of “invisible seeds” suggests that he roots his arguments in what can be seen and proven. Attention to this facet of his reasoning helps to explain his theories of nature, but can be even more valuable when considered as important to his understanding of the divine nature. Lactantius’ idea of the Christian God is located in experience and observation; just as he believes the created world to have necessitated the involvement of design and artifice, so too does he believe that such design and artifice can come from no other source but a divine being.
Lactantius culls support for the idea that nature itself is an insufficient creative force for the world by examining human nature; following a quotation from Chrysippus, he reasons that humans’ inability to make “heavenly things” demands that something greater exists.292 Those who maintain that nature is the “mother of all things” do so incorrectly because they fail to recognize that nature lacks mind (mens), thereby rendering it incapable of planning, “contriving,” or “effecting” anything. Such an absence of mind means too that the being in question (whether nature or something else) lacks the capacity to reflect, which according to Lactantius means that “there is neither motion nor efficacy.”293 In advocating for an active divinity, Lactantius again mirrors the text of De natura deorum, and again relies on it as an articulation of philosophical agreement and argumentation. Further, humans themselves again are seen as evidence for the nature and effect of God; humans were given a portion of the divine wisdom and reason so that they too could create the things which they required.294
Ciceronian echoes continue as Lactantius returns to the idea of divine providence and moves forward in his discussion of the links between the human and divine natures. Using a sort of etymologizing hermeneutic, Lactantius argues that humans—so named because of the ground, from which their bodies were made—have soul too only because it was given to them “from a wise nature.”295 Here the apologist’s use of Cicero is clearly flagged, an unusual occurrence in this text. He names both the Tusculan Disputations and Consolation as his source text(s) and proceeds to quote a few sentences about the separation of the soul from the earthly elements, including also two statements that echo his preceding arguments about the nature of mind (and the interconnectedness of mind and reflection) as well as the adamant assertion that all such things must come to humans from God.296 We have come full circle in this second to last paragraph, and again the “vain calumniators” are named: Diagoras, Theodorus, Leucippus, Democritus, and Epicurus are all abandoned by the majority in favor of the “authority” of Pythagoras, Socrates, Plato, and others who agreed on the question of providence.297 The degree to which Lactantius has traversed hundreds of years of philosophical thought is notable, as is the way he has done so. Throughout, the opponents remained the same (the usual list of Epicureans, and a handful of supposed ancient atheists), but Lactantius has constructed and defended his own position by appealing to a generalized picture of what every-one has said (he later adds Zeno and Aristotle to this list as well) with attributed quotations from Cicero’s philosophical treatises.
The endowment of both humans and the world itself with wisdom and intelligence is, for Lactantius, proof enough of God’s creation of the world, and with it, his providence over the world. In chapter eleven, he defends the idea that only one god can exist and govern the world and again both looks to earthly institutions as mirrors of the divine order and also relies on the cumulative voices of specific philosophers to demonstrate long-standing support of his claims. In a list of quick, simple statements, Lactantius rehearses centuries’ worth of argument; we might read his rather brief treatment of each item as a signal of the extent to which he viewed these philosophical tenets as shared and indisputable.298 To demonstrate that the divine power rests with only one divinity, he takes his reader through the chain of argument beginning with the idea of distribution. Should the “divine energy and power” be spread out among many gods, it by necessity must be lessened, and anything that is lessened must by necessity be mortal. Lest the reader miss the point, Lactantius reminds that the inverse is also true, namely that an immortal being can neither be lessened nor destroyed (here, “divided”).299 Terrestrial exempla round out the discussion: there can be only one ruler, one master, one helmsman of a ship, one leader, one queen bee, and further only one sun in the sky and one soul in the body.300 To disprove the possibility of multiple divinities even more clearly, Lactantius offers a quotation from Virgil, notes that one cannot describe in words or fully comprehend the supreme god with the senses, and questions whence the idea of polytheism even arose.301 He locates the idea of multiple deities in the remote past and endorses the view that all gods and goddesses were originally important men and women who were “invested with divine honors” after death, an explanation that he credits to the theologoi and then later Roman writers like Euhemerus and Ennius.302
It is here that Lactantius makes a curious pivot. He moves from Euhemerus and Ennius and right on to Cicero who, he writes, followed this line of thought and therefore (now explicitly citing the text) in his third book of De natura deorum “destroyed the public religions.”303 Cicero is identified as the clearest example of the philosopher’s problem: he was truly wise, but nonetheless unable “to introduce the true one [religion], of which he was ignorant,” and so remained on the second of the three steps that Lactantius believes each person must ascend in order to come to the worship of the Christian God.304 The effect is to create a tension between the public religions, as Lactantius calls them, most likely referring to the pluralistic polytheism of pagan antiquity, and the true religion, which is to say, Christianity. He again draws on Plato, this time citing the Timaeus, as evidence for the acknowledgement of one, supreme deity from an early date, and in so doing echoes his earlier assertion that Plato too thought the majesty of this god “so great, that it can neither be comprehended by the mind nor expressed by the tongue.”305 We might add to this that the Ciceronian version of the Platonic idea—or, at least, Lactantius’ pairing of the two here—underscores the debt that Lactantius owes to Cicero, and Cicero to Plato. A litany of ancient testimony follows: Hermes Trismegistus (who, Lactantius takes pains to point out, was thought to be Egyptian by Cicero and was older than Plato, Pythagoras, and the seven wise men), Socrates (paraphrasing Xenophon), Plato (now with a direct quotation from the Laws), Pythagoras, Antisthenes (Physics), Aristotle and the Peripatetics, and Zeno and the Stoics.
Given Lactantius’ general tendency to lump all philosophers together and to rely on Ciceronian paraphrases to express opinions on which those philosophers agree, his listing here is striking. Although he writes that it would take too long to go through each individual example, he does flesh out three briefly. Lactantius tells his reader that Pythagoras, for example, admitted that there is one God, “saying that there is an incorporeal mind, which, being diffused and stretched through all nature, gives vital perception to all living creatures,” but Antisthenes, however, wrote that “there was but one natural God,” despite the evidence of patron deities of individual peoples and cities.306 Perhaps as a way to anticipate any objections based on the differences between each philosopher, Lactantius pauses to point out the key ways in which Pythagoras and Antisthenes were distinct from one another but nevertheless, and importantly, still agreed on the significant point that only one god exists. Indeed, near the end of the chapter Lactantius writes that all of these philosophers, and others, “although they used different names, nevertheless agreed in one power which governed the world,” thereby including divine providence as a matter about which there exists philosophical consensus.307 This claim was the goal of the three chapters (nine through eleven) throughout which he took up the questions of the supreme god’s existence, his providence, and his singularity, and also served to cast Lactantius as holding the correct view based on the clout, diversity, and longevity of those who had come before him.
Yet the transition that Lactantius makes between these ideas and the closing sentiment of chapter eleven also casts him as the voice of dissent; he supports and endorses the philosophical consensus about the divine nature up to a point but makes a critical distinction between the philosophers on the one hand and Christian religion on the other hand. He writes, for example, that despite their keen perception of the divine nature, the philosophers (and poets!) “often acknowledge the supreme god, yet no one ever inquired into, no one discussed, the subject of his worship and honors,” and that “always believing him to be bounteous and incorruptible, they think that he is neither angry with anyone, nor stands in need of any worship.”308 As we have seen, more often than not, Lactantius casts his vote in favor of the majority. On the face of it, this can be read as disingenuous: of course the author will draw upon the strength of a majority philosophical opinion when he wants to present himself as supported by those traditions. Yet, if we look to the argument of the treatise on a broad scale as well as his claims about religion and divine wrath more specifically, Lactantius has little difficulty breaking from that consensus when he wants to distinguish his own opinion from that of his predecessors and contemporaries. Plato, Socrates, the Stoics, and others are thus transformed from the wise, sage men of the past whose agreement on the questions of monotheism and divine providence were tantamount to Lactantius’ argument, and become instead the senseless and illogical philosophers, more broadly construed, against whom Lactantius directs his own assertions.
In contrast to his preceding leniency towards the philosophers, when it comes to the definition and true understanding of divine wrath, Lactantius finds that all of the philosophical schools are mistaken: the Epicureans, with their belief in God’s atar-xia, remove all power from him, and the Stoics do not see the difference between “just and unjust anger.”309 Such distinctions force Lactantius to define anger, a process which he undertakes through a series of rejections:
Moreover it is apparent that the philosophers did not know the ratio of anger from their definitions, which Seneca enumerated in the books which he composed about anger. “Anger is,” he says, “the desire of avenging an injury.” Others, as Posidonius says, describe it as the desire of punishing him by whom you think that you have been unfairly injured. Some have defined it in this way: “Anger is an incitement of the mind to injure him who either has committed an injury, or who has wished to commit an injury.” The definition of Aristotle is not very far from ours; for he says that “anger is the desire of requiting pain.”310
Even Cicero’s definition of anger is tossed aside, as Lactantius finds it to be too similar to those which he has already derided. His own definition seeks to reframe the philosophers’ misunderstanding and involves important shifts in vocabulary: for Lactantius, anger is “an emotion of the mind arousing itself for the restraining of faults.”311 De ira Dei culminates here, as Lactantius lays out the various definitions of the philosophers and then offers his own. The remainder of the treatise expands on this theme and offers various proof-texts to support the understanding of God’s wrath as correct and necessary. More to the point for this study, however, this chapter of the text also encapsulates Lactantius’ relationship to philosophy and philosophers: he frequently relies on them when seeking out an authoritative opinion, but just as frequently he incorporates specific philosophical viewpoints only to demonstrate their falsity.
The move from philosophical consensus about specific facets of the divine nature to a consideration of philosophers’ deficient understanding of anger helps to shift the debate away from divine wrath and to anger itself; we move from theology and musings about the divine, towards an examination of behavioral and ethical philosophical practice. In the immediately subsequent chapter (eighteen), Lactantius continues to discuss the various ways in which the philosophers failed to comprehend the true virtue and application of anger. They claim, he writes, that anger is a vice and must be absent from the punishment of faults; he asserts in response that anger is instead a virtue (or at least that it should be positively understood) and is in fact necessary for the punishment of offenses.312 Archytas of Tarentum, that classical paradigm for the role of anger in the response to injustice, is then attacked by Lactantius for his failure to embrace the anger that he rightly felt upon returning home to find his land and property laid waste by his slaves.313 Critical for Lactantius is that, in the case of Archytas, the action meriting a reaction supported by anger was committed by someone inferior to him; had the injustice been committed by an equal or a superior, Archytas would have behaved as he did rightly.314 In Lactantius’ perspective, it is neither correct nor possible to restrain one’s anger when confronted by an offense undertaken by someone in a position (social or otherwise) below the person offended.
Lactantius leaves little room for interpretation, and closes this section with an extrapolation to the divine nature, here making his most significant break from the philosophical tradition. It is not without reason that the philosophers have been absent from chapters seventeen and eighteen. Despite invoking them as the representatives of opinions that he must refute, Lactantius at no point seeks to add clout to his arguments by drawing upon any previous philosophers or philosophical opinions. He returns at the end of chapter eighteen to a consideration of god’s soul (notably not his figura, lest it get him in trouble with the Stoics) as possessing those qualities which he had earlier demonstrated it to possess, and where he found others to be in agreement with him. “It if belongs to God,” he writes, “to reflect, to be wise, to understand, to foresee, to excel,” then he by necessity must get angry.315 A contrast is drawn, however, between divine anger and human anger, while the one is controlled and appropriate, the other is likely to bleed too easily into uncontrolled fury and violence.316 By restructuring the definition of anger along the lines of virtue and vice, Lactantius attempts to make the idea more appealing to philosophers. Their inability to understand anger correctly was due, in this formulation, to their misunderstanding of its true nature, and if it is taken to be a good, virtuous thing when employed by a being about whose nature (as he has already shown) they can all agree, then surely the concept of divine wrath can be more palatable to his opponents.
It is in chapter eighteen, too, that we find the last reference to a named philosopher in the treatise (of which another five chapters remain).317 As has already been the case earlier in the text, the names of Plato, Socrates, and others are conspicuously absent when Lactantius is breaking from the traditions which he considered to have been founded by prominent philosophers of antiquity. The final chapters are also those in which Lactantius focuses more on the Christian God, ideas and beliefs related to that god, and the provision of evidence that supports his claims about divine wrath. Two types of such chapters exist, as there are those in which Lactantius’ seeming disengagement with the philosophical tradition is intended as a rebuke of philosophical tenets, and there are others in which his rhetorical strategy is to respond to that tradition in a more robust way. In the first case, most clearly observed in chapters nineteen through twenty-one, Lactantius is concerned with linking divine providence to the divine law and then an infraction of that law as deserving an angry response; second, with proving that God’s mercy is as important as his anger; and third, with further differentiating human and divine anger. At each turn, he seeks to anticipate his (imagined) opponents’ counter-arguments: what could provoke divine wrath? if God has anger, and the world is so full of faults, why has he not destroyed everything? and, finally, how can one ascribe to the supreme god an attribute as base and as vicious as anger?
Viewed in this way, the structure of the treatise reveals the rhetorical and philosophical craft deployed by Lactantius. Similarly, the final two chapters can be read as a response to a perceived need to offer evidence, specifically in the form of proof-texts. Once again, Lactantius shows himself to be concerned with a philosophically-minded audience. Rather than sprinkle these final chapters with verses culled from the scriptures of the Hebrew and Christian Bibles, Lactantius provides instead quotations plucked from the Sibylline books. His purpose in doing so is made explicit: although the testimony of the prophets is sufficient for Lactantius and those who share his beliefs, “it is not believed by those who make a display of wisdom by their hair and dress. Let us therefore seek those testimonies which they can either believe, or at any rate not oppose.”318 Various testimonies are given, from a handful of different Sibyls (each with its own brief history); similarly in the next and final chapter, Lactantius again draws attention to this method by writing that because most “learned men” agree that there have been many Sibyls, he will include evidence from multiple Sibyls.319 He proceeds to give evidence in the form of paraphrases and quotations of the Cumaean Sibyl as well as others. In each proof text, the quotation serves to support the idea that the one, supreme God does in fact get angry, and that his anger is instigated by human actions and behaviors. The Sibylline oracles are thus appropriated by Lactantius and reoriented to his purpose, and this refashioning of the prophetic texts positions them as links between, on the one hand, the philosophical consensus that Lactantius had worked so carefully to demonstrate and to endorse, and on the other hand, the more radical view that understood that supreme god as possessing the emotion of anger.
Lactantius’ piecemeal approach to classical philosophy is not entirely novel, at least in comparison to his Latinate contemporaries; across the corpus of apologists writing in Latin throughout the earliest centuries of the common era, we see various tenets of Platonic philosophy, in particular, adopted and upheld by Christian authors. Some, like Tertullian, are more vocal about the evils they see embedded in philosophical discourse (and committed by those who engage in such discourse), but are nonetheless making use of philosophical arguments in the middle of their protestations.320 Elsewhere I have argued that Lactantius privileges not necessarily the “Christian,” but rather the rhetorical, as both the structure and argument of the text, and that his own comments on this point are illustrative of the ways in which De ira Dei is grounded in classical Roman rhetorical practice and theory.321 By grounding his argument in rhetorical principles, Lactantius is able to claim that his ratio is stronger than that of the philosophers; indeed, he often returns to the need for wisdom and reason, together, to demarcate the appropriate perspective on divine wrath.322
The influence of Cicero is pervasive and inescapable. We find the classical orator’s effect on Lactantius in the highly rhetorical nature of the treatise, and we see lengthy fragments of De natura deorum paraphrased and sometimes quoted fully at key moments. Lactantius’ reliance on Cicero is one of two facets of the text that make it both ordinary and unique as a product of intellectual culture in the early fourth century CE. On the one hand, the invocation of classical models is expected in a text of this period, it would only seem more curious if such models were absent. Yet on the other hand, Lactantius’ appropriation of two, quite varied, Ciceronian works brings to the fore a tension between the text as a piece of rhetorical showmanship, targeted against the philosophers, and its simultaneous regurgitation of philosophical principles as encapsulated by Cicero. Lactantius’ decision to channel his discussions of the Stoics and Epicureans through De natura deorum is itself informative and can only be read as intentional. If these philosophical schools were truly his intended targets, one wonders why he refrained from attacking them as they currently existed, and chose instead to recapitulate Cicero’s Stoics and Epicureans (remembering, too, that the philosophers of De natura deorum are unlikely to be accurate representations of those schools as they existed in Cicero’s own day).323
Such a recasting of the classical debate not merely betrays Lactantius’ own indebtedness to intellectual traditions, but also helps to underscore the second way in which this treatise is both predictable and peculiar. Classical literature, whether in Greek or Latin, whether poetry or prose, was cited, quoted, and paraphrased by later writers to a sometimes dizzying degree—and used, in tandem, to demonstrate the veracity of an opinion. Quotation was not simply proof of erudition but also evidence of a point; to have the weight of antiquity on one’s side was to have excellent support for an argument. The invocation of model and method that we see in Lactantius has parallels in other writers, both Christian and non-Christian of this period, but the use of Cicero to prove a theological point is relatively rare. This is particularly so in comparison to Graecophone authors, who more clearly and consistently make use of Plato, or some iteration of Platonic philosophy, to support their theological claims about the Christian God. Plato is key to the exegetical tradition, for it is through careful allegorical and figural readings of their sacred texts that Christians of the second and third centuries justify and explain their supreme god despite the difficulties posed by the text themselves.324 The relationship is somewhat circular: the scriptures of the Hebrew and Christian Bibles represent the Judaeo-Christian God in anthropomorphic and anthropopathic terms, and in order to defend that god against the criticisms of philosophers who view him as another god akin to those of the Greek and Roman pantheons, Christian exegetes (and others) must bring to those texts a hermeneutic that allows them to claim that this God can be aligned with the supreme god of that philosophical tradition.
Lactantius, as we have seen, has no qualms about adopting a series of such classical philosophical tenets, many of which he ascribes to Plato or the schools that developed out of and in response to Platonism. The areas to which he draws his reader’s attention are those which are fundamental to a beginning sketch of the divine nature, and through Lactantius’ discourse against atheists and those who, like Epicurus, deny that a divine providence governs the world, the similarities between the Christian God and the supreme god of the philosophers are brought to the fore: both exist, both are superior in every way, and both created and take care of the world and those who inhabit it. Interestingly, Lactantius glosses over some of the important facets of the divine nature relevant to this discussion. The immutability and impassibility of the supreme god are two such topics which one would expect to find explored here, not least because of their connection to his defense of divine anger. Lactantius’ conspicuous omission of any mention of either suggests not his ignorance but rather his intentional disregard of the philosophical consensus on these points. Here again, he is instead content to approach the question through a passage from De natura deorum; by countering the Stoic claim that God has neither form nor figure, Lactantius discreetly (at least insofar as he does not devote much time or space to discussion) yet pointedly breaks from the classical philosophical tradition.
De ira Dei is surprising then, not just for the relatively rare claim its author makes about the reality of divine wrath, but also for the ways in which he plays with individual representatives of and ideas maintained within classical philosophical thought. For Lactantius, God’s wrath does not involve an overturning of all previous philosophy (as one might expect), but rather the reorientation of ethical and practical philosophy based on a re-evaluation of the emotion of anger. Despite his dissatisfaction with philosophers generally and, especially, Epicurus, we find in Lactantius’ upholding of key philosophical tenets that Plato and the Platonic tradition survive here in muted and diffused ways. Whether he meant to or not, and although the degree to which he might have been aware of it remains questionable, Lactantius did engage with the traditions against which he positioned himself in the treatise. In this way, he merits consideration alongside other authors of the third and fourth centuries. The particular ways in which Platonism exists in this text and others of his corpus can illuminate, by way of contrast, how the majority of Graecophone authors, Christian and non-Christian, reacted to Platonic philosophy; similarly Lactantius’ and his Latinate contemporaries’ relationship to Cicero, by way of comparison, can help to elucidate shifts in intellectual culture and doxographic links between Apuleius and Augustine.