Reading Patristic Texts on Social Ethics: Issues and Challenges for the Twenty-First Century

9. Social Justice in Lactantius’s Divine Institutes: An Exploration

185 Thomas Hughson, S.J. 9. Social Justice in Lactantius’s Divine Institutes An Exploration This inquiry interprets a fourth-century Church Father’s main work in reference to social justice, a characteristic theme in Catholic social thought and Catholic social teaching.1 The overall perspective is postcritical in the sense of probing for a relation between an ancient text and a modern or postmodern context in Church and world. That approach does not derogate from critical study, on which it relies, though a postcritical purpose inherently assumes that readers from later contexts can bring new questions to the text as well as submit to its otherness. Moving from critical exegesis of a biblical passage to preaching an application would be parallel to this.2 Because of different starting-points, the former ready to distance itself from the modern context, the latter not, different habits of mind are operative in critical and postcritical study of an ancient text.3 The tension between them is inevitable 1. “Catholic social thought” is roughly equivalent to another concept, “social Catholicism.” They both encompass local, pastoral, grass-roots initiatives, and thinking throughout the Church in reciprocity with official Catholic social teaching. Catholic social thought and social Catholicism go beyond a purely top-down idea of Catholic social teaching. 2. Brian Daley upholds both historical-critical study of the Bible and the Church Fathers’ theological , figural mode of biblical exegesis oriented to preaching, worship, and prayer. “Is Patristic Exegesis Still Usable? Some Reflections on Early Christian Interpretation of the Psalms,” in The Art of Reading Scripture , ed. Ellen F.Davis and Richard B.Hays (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans Publishing, 2003), 69–88. 3. This is clear in Hans-Georg Gadamer’s distinction between a legal historian and a judge as they 186 Thomas Hughson, S.J. and understandable. Critical analysis may have reason to correct or challenge factual matters in a postcritical interpretation. Postcritical application completes critical study by integrating application into interpretation—respect for each task is appropriate. Admittedly, while hermeneutics shows the legitimacy of postcritical questions and offers some main orientations in seeking answers, neither questions nor answers have a controlled precision comparable to critical investigation into, for example, paleography or the date and authenticity of a text. So it may be most forthright to treat postcritical application as a hypothesis on an ancient text’s meaningfulness today. But then, arguing for a hypothesis rather than establishing certainty after certainty belongs to critical study too. The textual point of departure here is From Irenaeus to Grotius: A Sourcebook of Christian Political Thought 100–1626.4 Readers of this valuable anthology come across excerpts from books V and VI of Lacantius’s Divine Institutes likely to intrigue anyone interested in Catholic social thought and social justice. The editors point out that Lactantius (ca. 250–325 CE) was “the first Christian thinker to subject the idea of justice to serious analysis.”5 More to the point, passages seem to present a Christian critique of the structure of imperial society, not just the vices, errors, and follies of individuals. For instance, in the following excerpt Lactantius criticizes the greed of a whole sector of Roman society, the prosperous who multiply their possessions at the expense of others left poorer by this rapacity. And he situates this tendency within an overall picture of societal decline from the Golden Age of King Saturn to the more acquisitive Age of Jupiter reflected in Virgil’s Aeniad, still a potent epic of Roman identity in late antiquity. pore over legal history. The judge has an eye toward application and an exercise of phronesis, prudence, in making a legal decision on a case before him or her. For Gadamer and hermeneutics the judge represents the situation of all knowers while the legal historian prescinds from application. Gadamer does not rule that out altogether but does not see it as exemplary, universal, and complete either. Hans-Georg Gadamer , Truth and Method, 2nd rev. ed., trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G.Marshall (New York: Continuum Books, 1999), especially the section on “The Recovery of the Fundamental Hermeneutical Problem ,” 307–41. This English edition is based on the revised, expanded 5th German edition of Wahrheit und Methode, in Gesammelte Werken 1 (Tübingen: Mohr, 1986); Mohr published the first German edition at Tübingen in 1960. 4. Oliver O’Donovan and Joan Lockwood O’Donovan, eds., From Irenaeus to Grotius: A Sourcebook in Christian Political Thought 100–1626 (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1999), 46...