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Lactantius and Empire: Political Theology in On the Deaths of the Persecutors

Abstract:This article presents a new reading of On the Deaths of the Persecutors as a means to better appreciate Lactantius's political theology. Starting with this text's oddest feature—that though it ostensibly focuses on imperial mistreatment of Christians and the divine punishment that it provoked, much of it in fact does not discuss Christians or Christianity at all—and reading it both in its historical (non-Constantinian) context and as an active intervention in the ideological competition of Lactantius's day, can, I suggest, put our understanding of Lactantius's political theology on a new footing. I argue, first, that Lactantius sought to highlight the dysfunctionality of the non-Christian tetrarchs' interrelationships; second, that he suggested that these intra-imperial machinations had catalyzed systematic mistreatment of household and subject, and sustained social and economic disruption in the empire at large—in other words a continuation of the third century "crisis"—and, third, that he offered Christianity and Christians as delivering that which the non-Christian tetrarchs had not: harmonious imperial relationships, positive treatment of households, and a stable empire. This represents the practical working out of a theory of iustitia inherited from but designed to supersede Cicero. Read thus, On the Deaths of the Persecutors becomes the crown in Lactantius's oeuvre, a crucial epilogue to the Divine Institutes in which Lactantius sought to work through the practical consequences of his theology.