Book Six Of True Worship

Book Six of the Divinae Institutiones, sometimes given the subtitle De Vero Cultu or On True Worship, is the penultimate book of Lactantius’s seven volume defense of Christianity. Written in the early fourth century, probably between 305 and 313, the larger work was aimed at educated pagan readers in the late Roman Empire, the kind of people who could quote Cicero and who needed to be addressed in their own intellectual language if they were going to take the new religion seriously.

This particular book turns from the metaphysical and philosophical questions of the earlier volumes to the practical question of how a Christian should actually live. Lactantius argues that true worship is not primarily a matter of ritual or sacrifice but of moral conduct, of justice toward other human beings, and of the cultivation of virtues like mercy, humility, and self control. He draws extensively on Stoic ethics, on Cicero’s De Officiis, and on the Sermon on the Mount, weaving them together in a way meant to show that Christianity was the natural fulfillment of the best of pagan moral philosophy rather than a rejection of it.

Lactantius is sometimes called the Christian Cicero because of the polish of his Latin prose, and Book Six shows him at his most accessible. The arguments are clear, the structure is logical, and the moral examples are the kind of thing a literate Roman would recognize from his school days. For modern readers interested in how early Christianity engaged with classical philosophy, or in the history of Christian ethics before Augustine systematized it, this is a useful primary source.

The English translation is generally readable. Anyone working with the text in a serious way will want a good edition with notes that flag Lactantius’s sources and the contemporary controversies he was responding to.