The Making of a Christian Empire: Lactantius & Rome (review)

The Making of a Christian Empire: Lactantius & Rome. By Elizabeth DePalma Digeser. (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press. 2000. Pp. xvii, 199. $39.95.)

Elizabeth DePalma Digeser, a recent Ph.D. in ancient history from the University of California, Santa Barbara (1996), and a current assistant professor for Roman history at McGill University in Montreal, proffers an interesting and controversial analysis of the Divine Institutes of Lactantius in The Making of a Christian Empire. Historians of early Christianity will welcome this detailed treatment of the Institutes of Lactantius in the English language, and will appreciate this thorough assessment of that work within the religious debates of the fourth century. However, as is often the case with dissertations expanded into first books, the author overlooks some important questions and sources, and pushes her thesis further than the evidence allows.

The book begins with a prologue set in Nicomedia during the winter of 302-03. Digeser posits that the pagan intellectuals Hierocles and Porphyry were giving public lectures in support of the new tetrarchic political theology, and assailing the Christians for failing to support the new order and "refusing the guidance of emperors, jurists, and philosophers." She is on firm ground in assuming that Lactantius was in Nicomedia at that time, and that pagan literary attacks and the start of the "Great Persecution" by Diocletian and Galerius that winter inspired him to compose the Divine Institutes as an answer to the critics of Christianity and as "a manifesto for political and religious reform" (pp. 1-17). Yet, her identification of Porphyry with the unnamed philosopher mentioned in Book V of the Divine Institutes, and his On Philosophy from Oracles as the work read in Nicomedia that winter will not be acceptable to all. There is no evidence for a journey by Porphyry to the east at that time, and many scholars, including Timothy Barnes, feel that the work on Oracles was written much earlier and that his great tome Against the Christians was composed nearer to the start of the "Great Persecution."

The bulk of the book is divided into five chapters in which the author details Lactantius' criticisms of Diocletian's policies and his later influence on Constantine's policies. The first three chapters are the strongest. In these Digeser shows how Lactantius attacked the political, legal, and philosophical underpinnings of Diocletian's tetrarchic system, stigmatizing them as tyrannical, unjust, and irrational innovations from earlier Roman traditions. She relates how Lactantius presented Christians as deserving of toleration because their beliefs were compatible with the more legitimate principatial, Ciceronian, and Neoplatonic concepts of rule, law, and philosophy (pp. 19-90). In Chapter IV she expands upon her thesis that Porphyry was the anonymous philosopher against whom Lactantius was writing the Divine Institutes, and that many of the arguments in it were meant to refute the contentions in the On Philosophy from Oracles that Christians did not deserve tolerance--her arguments are well presented, but not entirely convincing (pp. 91-114).

In Chapter V Digeser posits that Constantine the Great accepted the arguments of Lactantius, and used them as the basis to build a religious policy of concord in which his Christian Empire "was a palace for Christians, a home for monotheists, and a school for polytheists" (pp. 115-143). As this reviewer has argued before her--Journal of Religious History, XVII (1993), 274ff., and Catholic Historical Review, LXXXI (1995), 327ff.--she is certainly correct in stressing that Constantine studied the Divine Institutes and employed some of its ideas in his own religious writings and public policies. However, she has probably placed Constantine's study with Lactantius too early in his reign, and overemphasized his influence on his later policies. She maintains that Constantine studied with Lactantius at Trier between 310 and 313. The link between Lactantius and Constantine was the latter's first son Crispus, who the ancient sources relate was tutored by Lactantius in Gaul. However, Digeser...