Lactantius

Life

Lactantius is believed to have been born in the mid-third century in Roman North Africa. He is said to have studied under Arnobius, a rhetorician (a teacher of speaking and writing). The emperor Diocletian summoned him to Nicomedia, the eastern capital, to teach Latin rhetoric. He appears to have converted to Christianity around that time, and when the Diocletianic Persecution began in 303, he lost his teaching post and fell on hard times. In his old age, he is reported to have been summoned by Constantine I to Trier in Gaul, where he tutored the emperor's eldest son, Crispus. The year and place of his death are uncertain.

Work and Contributions

Lactantius was a lay writer, not a member of the clergy. His principal work, the Divine Institutes (Divinae Institutiones), criticizes pagan philosophy and polytheistic worship and presents a systematic apologetic (a reasoned explanation and defense of the faith) for Christianity. It is regarded as the first comprehensive attempt to set out Christian thought in Latin. He sought to persuade educated Roman intellectuals by writing in polished, Ciceronian Latin.

On the Deaths of the Persecutors (De mortibus persecutorum) recounts how the emperors who persecuted Christians met miserable ends. It is considered an important historical source for the Diocletianic Persecution and the early Constantinian era. The book also records that just before the Battle of the Milvian Bridge in 312, Constantine received instructions in a dream and had his soldiers mark their shields with a sign representing Christ. His other works include On the Workmanship of God and On the Anger of God.

Influence on the Korean Church

Lactantius has had little direct influence on the Korean church. He is mentioned chiefly in seminary courses on early church history and in introductory church history textbooks, as the author of primary sources (materials on which historical research is based) for the persecutions in the Roman Empire and the conversion of Constantine.

Assessment

Renaissance humanists called him "the Christian Cicero" because of the elegance of his style. His theological depth, however, was criticized from an early date. Jerome remarked, in effect, that Lactantius was adept at demolishing the errors of others but less successful at establishing Christian teaching. The Divine Institutes contains a millenarian view according to which the world, after six thousand years, will enter a literal thousand-year reign. For this reason, later discussions of eschatology treat him as an example of early millennialism. He also ridiculed the idea that people live on the opposite side of the earth, a passage frequently cited in modern times as an example of the limits of his understanding of the natural world.

His writings are studied as evidence of what the Latin theology of the early church looked like before Augustine.