Ante-Nicene Fathers, Vol. 7 (Lactantius, Venantius, Victorinus, Dionysius)

We may be sure there were tears of joy and warm embraces among kindred long torn asunder by their common exposures to fire and sword. We cannot imagine, indeed, everything that was in the hearts of those Christian families that now kept holiday together in the face of the world, and sang fearlessly in holy places their anthem, “Christ is risen from the dead.” But we ought to give a moment’s thought, as we pass into a stage of history entirely fresh and new, to the power of God thus manifested. The miracle thus wrought by the ascended Christ needs no aid from the supposed “vision of Constantine” to make it a supernatural exhibition of the glory of Him who is “King of kings and Lord of lords.”

Arnobius Lactantius's teacher. wrote to the minds of perplexed Pilates Referring to the Roman governors who asked, "What is truth?" asking “What is truth?” in a new spirit, and they were not indisposed to wash their hands of the blood of Jesus, though not prepared to believe and be baptized. His pupil finds a better sort of Pilate in the Emperor and his period. Constantine is a pagan still at heart, but he is convinced of the truth that Christ has a kingdom “not of this world”; and he must be given credit, more than the Antonines, for recognizing in the Christians not only his best and most loyal subjects, but men of a character altogether superior to that of the heathens who had long been the counselors of the empire. He was also one who accepted “the logic of events” and who came to terms with the inevitable in time to turn it to his own advantage.

I think Constantine had read the Apologies addressed to the Antonines by Justin Martyr, and was at first disposed only to accept the plea for Christians as far as Justin had urged it. Going that far, he was led beyond his positive convictions to measures of policy which identified him with the Church. That the Church was distrustful of him, and doubted how long the imperial favor might be relied upon, is also apparent. This doubt accounts, in some degree, for the great moderation of the Church in accepting benefits from him and in withholding notes of triumph. She instinctively foresaw Julians Referring to Julian the Apostate, who later attempted to reverse the Church's gains. in the way and expected reactionary periods. She refrained from baptizing the Emperor and encouraged his disposition to postpone it. It was as when “the wolf of Benjamin” Referring to Saul of Tarsus (St. Paul). was introduced to the disciples: “they were afraid of him, and believed not that he was a disciple.”

Lactantius, moved perhaps by Hosius or Eusebius, undertakes the instruction of the Emperor, while seeming only to copy the example of Justin writing to Antoninus Pius. The Institutes had indeed been begun at an earlier date; but he economizes the material for a new purpose—material in which he had perhaps only intended to follow the work of his teacher, using language better suited to the educated, to refute heathenism. I cannot doubt that he aimed, in pure Latin, to win the Emperor and his court to a deeper and purer conviction of divine truth: to more than a feeble and possibly superstitious idea that it was useless to contend with it, and that the gods of the empire were powerless to protect themselves against Christian progress and its masterly exposures of their shame and nothingness.

In language that has given him the title of the “Christian Cicero,” Lactantius employs Cicero himself as a defender of the truth; correcting him, indeed, and overruling his mistakes, rebuking his cowardice, and justly censuring him: (1) in philosophy, for declaring it no rule of action, however ennobling its precepts; and (2) in religion, for not venturing to profess conclusions to which his reasonings necessarily lead. All this is admirably adapted to carry on the work of Christian Fathers and Apologists under the changing times. He and Arnobius provide only a supplement to the real teachers of the Church and are not to be always depended upon in their statements of doctrine. They write like earnest converts, not like theologians; yet, although their loose expressions are often inconsistent with one another, it is manifest that their design is to support orthodoxy as it had been defined by abler expounders. I think the great respect that Lactantius pays to the testimony of the Sibyls Ancient pagan prophetesses whom early Christians believed foretold the coming of Christ. was addressed to the class with which he had to deal. Constantine was greatly influenced by such testimonies, if we may judge from his own liberal quotations and his comments on Virgil’s Pollio A work often interpreted by early Christians as a messianic prophecy., to which our author may have introduced him.