Book Three Of The False Wisdom Of Philosophers

Book Three of the Divinae Institutiones, often given the subtitle De Falsa Sapientia Philosophorum or On the False Wisdom of Philosophers, is one of the more polemical books in the seven volume defense of Christianity that Lactantius wrote in the early fourth century. The larger work was aimed at educated pagan readers in the late Roman Empire who knew their classical philosophy well, and Book Three takes up the project of arguing that the various pagan philosophical schools, despite their genuine intellectual achievements, ultimately failed to provide the unified account of human life that Christianity offered.

Lactantius works through the major schools of classical philosophy in turn. The Pythagoreans, the Stoics, the Epicureans, the Academics, the Peripatetics, and the various skeptical traditions all come in for sustained criticism, with Lactantius drawing on Cicero’s philosophical works as his primary source material for many of the doctrines he is engaging with. The argument is not that the philosophers had nothing valuable to say. Lactantius repeatedly acknowledges the genuine wisdom found in the Stoic ethical writings, the Platonic metaphysics, and other strands of classical thought. The argument is that each school grasped only a partial truth, and that the divisions between the schools showed the inadequacy of philosophy as a method for arriving at the truth as a whole.

The positive case for Christianity that runs underneath the criticism is that the new religion offered what philosophy could not. A unified account of God, the world, and the human soul that did not require the reader to choose between competing schools because all of the partial truths were brought together in a single coherent framework. Whether the argument convinced any actual pagan readers in Lactantius’s own day is uncertain. What it did do was provide later Christian thinkers with a model for how to engage with classical philosophy from inside the Christian tradition.

For students of late antiquity, of patristic literature, or of the long history of Christian engagement with Greek and Roman philosophy, Book Three is essential. The English translation is generally readable.