Cicero Christianised

While Greek-speaking Christians had a long tradition of applying philosophy to religious questions, Latin-speaking Christians were slower to take advantage of it. If we ignore the rather antiphilosophical Tertullian, the first Latin Christian philosopher of note, Lactantius, discoursed especially with the Latin tradition of philosophers, such as Cicero and Seneca. Like them, Lactantius endorses the idea that world was made for a purpose. He especially extols the symmetrical, beautiful and intricate structure of human body and the materialistically insolvable wonder of life processes as proofs of the existence of a divine designer. A major point of his criticism is the Epicurean idea that gods in their perfection would have nothing to do with lesser beings. Lactantius instead notes that a truly powerful being would essentially use its power and not remain passive.

Although Lactantius sympathises with the Stoic idea that the organiser of the world cared providentially for other entities, unlike them, he believes that God would also punish those behaving against the rules of good life - in addition to love, God could also experience anger. Of course, Lactantius admits, this divine anger is not be blind rage or fury, but a will for a just retribution against subjects who ignored the commands of their superior. Thus, emperors who had persecuted Christians were eventually punished by God.

Lactantius insists that only a single designer could be behind the world around us. If there would be several creators, he argues, their creations would essentially limit one another, thus making it impossible that world would form a unified whole. Hence, he rejects the polytheism inherent in Roman religion. Supposed divinities, Lactantius speculates, had been mere mortal human beings. Statues and images were made of them, originally just to make their memory last. Due to their fame, they had finally been relegated to the status of gods, and images made of them were worshiped in hope of rewards. They were thus no true gods, and even their fame was often due to quite wrong reasons, such as their physical prowess.

The falsity of Roman gods, Lactantius believes, had been known by philosophers, but they still could not find true religion with mere human reason. Some of them, like Cicero, still followed the common rituals, out of respect for tradition. Yet, Lactantius thinks, previous generations had been not wiser than current generations, so it would have been better to cease such futile traditions altogether, since they were contrary to reason. He has no respect either for philosophers who called natural things, like planets, gods. Planets do follow regular courses, unlike earthly objects with quite fortuitous movements, Lactantius admits, but this is no sign of their divinity - it just shows that God had ordained their movements.

The ultimate source of the errors of polytheists, and indeed, the ultimate source of everything evil, Lactantius suggests, is a creature which had rebelled against God, because it was jealous of perfection it did not possess. Lactantius is somewhat ambivalent of the status of this adversary. On the one hand, he says, the choice of the adversary had been free and God had merely given it the ability to err. On the other hand, Lactantius also insists, God requires opposite forces, that is, both good and evil, for creation of the world.

Although Lactantius speaks as if God required good and evil to make the world, he does not mean that God was in need of pre-existing material for his creation, like pagan thinkers had believed. Instead, Lactantius is certain that God was able to create, in addition to conscious beings, also something that has no consciousness at all, namely, matter. Indeed, he continues, if matter had existed eternally, it must have been incapable of being changed in any fashion and so utterly unsuitable for the role of material to be shaped.

Lactantius’ account of creation shows a rather old-fashioned view of the world, even in the context of ancient philosophy. Just like good and evil are the two forces governing the world, Lactantius says, the world also contains two regions - the heavenly abode full of light and essentially dark earth underneath it. The region of earth is also characterised by the same duality - East is where sun rises and light begins, while West is where the sun sets and darkness begins. Lactantius is obviously speaking about a flat earth, and to complete the account, he notes that cold North is close to dark West and warm South to light East. The geographical duality, he continues, is linked to a temporal duality, where day is filled with a single light of Sun, while dark night is only feebly lighted by the plurality of stars.

In addition to world in general, Lactantius notes, God designed also living things, which again require duality - divine heat in them is tempered by wetness of water. Lactantius explicitly notes that animals could not have been born without the help of divinity. He especially disparages the Epicurean notion that earth would have spontaneously been filled with the first individuals of all animal species and that it would have produced milkish sustenance to all these animals. Lactantius argues that world could not have been so different in the beginning, and if it were, animals could not have survived to adulthood without divine guidance.

The duality of animals, Lactantius believes, is augmented by another duality in human beings - the human body is infused by divine breath or soul. Although these two parts are necessary components of a human being, Lactantius notes that the soul is meant to be the controlling part of this combination. A person who lets his body control his soul will then be evil.

Lactantius continues then with details taken out of Biblical stories. First human beings had lived in eastern part of the world, which symbolises the goodness of the whole world. The adversary tricked humans into breaking God’s commands, which led to them being expelled from the paradise. Humans lost their immortality, but retained long lives, until God flooded the world because of the wicked ways of humankind. After that event, the humans who had remained alive filled all the corners of the earth, and the true religion faded away from their memories.

God had created guardians for the human race, Lactantius writes, but the adversary seduced some of them to succumb to temptation of bodies and to produce children with human beings. These fallen guardians and their offspring became then henchmen of the adversary, according to Lactantius, and they spread various false teachings over the earth. God allowed them to do this, Lactantius conjectures, because he was willing to test the worth of human beings.

If pagan religions are for Lactantius just deceptions of demons, pagan philosophy as mere love of wisdom is for him no true wisdom. It consists, Lactantius says, either of an admission of human ignorance or of a collection of opinions masking itself as knowledge. The former, he notes, clearly does not deserve the name of wisdom, while the latter ignores the inevitable source of error inherent in the bodily constitution of a human being.

Lactantius is especially critical of the opinions of philosophers about ethics - physics and logic concern only frivolous issues, while ethics should guide our very behaviour. He considers particularly the supreme goals philosophers had suggested for human life and finds them all wanting: pleasure is a goal good for pigs, while knowledge and virtue are only good as means for further goals. True goal of human life, Lactantius suggests, has to be a reward for the worship of God, namely, an eternal life without the shackles of bodily restrictions.

Like many early Christian thinkers, Lactantius thinks that true wisdom is revealed to humankind through Logos, the first creation of God and in so intimate connection with him that it should be called the son of God. Logos could even be called God itself, without destroying the unity of divinity - it is the necessary manner in which God appeared and revealed itself and without it no knowledge of God was possible. Logos had taken a human form, Lactantius continues, in order to show the humankind an example of a perfect life. This perfect specimen had to be God, in order to have authority over all humans, but it had to also be a human, so that it would prove that human body was no complete obstacle for perfect life.

Pagan religion, Lactantius states, did not just block our connection to God, but it also undermined the whole society. Pagans worshiped Jupiter, who had rebelled against his father Saturn and thus destroyed the idyllic past. No wonder then, Lactantius continues, that the Roman society rewarded thugs and militaristic leaders. Christians, on the other hand, are willing to share their fortune with people of less means, and during a shipwreck they would gladly give the last plank to another person, because they know a true reward waits them in the afterlife. The injustice of pagans, Lactantius argues, can even be seen in that they will not argue for their religion, but persecute Christians, who decline to follow its rituals, while Christians force no one to convert to their religion.

The rituals of Christians, Lactantius points out, involve no animal sacrifices, but just living the life as it should be lived. This way of life is narrow and difficult one. Indeed, Lactantius goes even so far as to suggest that one could not naturally live a truly good life, unless one had the certainty given by God’s revelation that an immortal life would be its reward. Still, unlike some pagan philosophers had insisted, it is not enough just to know what one should do, if one does not really do it. Even the purging of sins by Logos is not enough, if one still continues to live a sinful life.

The life following this vision of divinity, Lactantius insists, should be a life dedicated to others and especially to those most in need. Lactantius notes that we have an innate way to recognise those needing our assistance, through the feeling of pity, and unliked Stoics insisted, we should follow this feeling, at least when done in moderation. Indeed, Lactantius notes that all feelings, even the seemingly negative ones, could be useful. We should not fear earthly pains, but we should fear divine punishments, and we should not be angered by evil works made against us, but we should use anger to control the urges of growing youngsters.

What one requires, according to Lactantius, is to control all emotions and sensations, so that their excess will not lead one away from one’s duties. Thus, Lactantius states, we should not use vision to watch brutal gladiator fights or rowdy theatricals, we should not use hearing to listen poems without moral teaching, we should not smell flowers or eat delicacies and we should not engage in sexual frivolities. While one might wonder why God then gave us the capacity to use all the senses in a manner we shouldn’t, Lactantius has a simple answer - good life requires battle against desires. Still, he does not think that one error would be enough to condemn a person, but honest repenting followed by good behaviour could still purge them.

God had made the world, Lactantius says, for the purpose of testing whether humans are capable of good life, which deserves then immortality for its prize. Human being is conjoined of good and evil - immortal soul and earthly body, with contrary desires pointing to different directions. In the state of innocence, the first human being did not yet understand the difference between the two. Lactantius suggests that fall was in a sense necessary step, because then human beings received the ability to understand the difference of good and evil in their own constitution. With this understanding, human beings became responsible for their evil nature and they were then appointed with the duty to purge themselves.

The final purification from all evil would require separation of soul from the evil of body. Lactantius suggests that this is in a sense a reason to believe in the immortality of soul - if we don’t assume it, it would make no sense to live a good life against the instigation of body. Against Epicureans, who thought that soul would instantly disperse when body collapsed, Lactantius insists that body is more like a container holding soul down. Thus, the slow collapse of the body can affect mental faculties, as long as soul is confined by the body, but when separated from the body, the soul would quickly return to its senses.

Once the purpose of the world is fulfilled, Lactantius notes, world in its current shape is not required and God as its creator has the power to undo it. For numerological reasons, Lactantius suggests that God has chosen number seven for this purpose. When world will have existed for six thousand years - something Lactantius thinks would happen in couple hundred years - Rome, which was already old, requiring the mastership of one person, will collapse in a civil war and finally its remnants will be assaulted by a king from north. Lactantius continues that the world will be in a state of upheaval, with land not bearing any fruit and all sorts of cosmological signs, like comets and eclipses, being commonplace. A final prophet will rise and do wonders, but will also be killed by an eastern tyrant, who will also have power to do all sorts of magic and who will pretend to be Logos. This state of constant warfare, Lactantius notes, will end when the real Logos returns to take up the governance of the world.

This will still not be the end of the world, Lactantius says, but it will continue existing for another thousand years. All the good people who had lived from the dawn of the world will rise from their graves and will go on to live and procreate - and some evil persons will also have survived, to be used as slaves. This millennium will be, Lactantius pictures, an era of prosperity, when world will spring honey and delicacies everywhere and the prince of evil would be chained. After thousand years, this source of all evil will be let free and he will incite nations of the world in a final assault against the fortification of Logos. This seems like a desperate attempt, since the end result, according to Lactantius, will be just God destroying the world as it is, with the remaining good persons surviving in caverns. The world will be made completely anew and the good human beings will receive new, purer bodies.

Strangely enough, Lactantius notes that all the evil people will also receive a kind of immortality, after all. They will be resurrected at this final moment and they will also receive new bodies. Yet, the purpose these bodies, Lactantius says, is just to make the evil persons suffer - they will be put to an everlasting fire, which while destroying flesh also renews it, thus making the bodily pain never-ending. And while Lactantius earlier disparaged people watching brutal fights, he somewhat inconsistently remarks that the just persons will go on watching the pain of their fellow human beings.